The Red Lotus

by Chris Bohjalian

  Once again, she made a list in her mind of all the innocuous possibilities for Austin’s absence. There were the villages along the route, and there were the little places on the flats on the north side of the mountain where the fishermen would get their provisions and the small snack shacks on the southern slope where tourists would stop to gaze out from their plastic chairs at the sea. Maybe he’d pulled over for noodles or steamed rice cakes or even a can of the Tiger beer that he loved, and he’d forgotten his phone on a little round wooden picnic table at the restaurant. Or his phone had run out of power. Or the cell coverage on the switchbacks was worse than they knew. Or he’d thought he’d sent her a text and forgotten to press Send. Certainly, she’d done that in her life, finding the text in its bubble, unsent, hours later or even the next morning. In this scenario, his phone was sitting in the left kidney pocket of his cycling jersey, and he had accidentally put the device on mute. (The scar from where the bullet had struck his arm was right around the hem of the short sleeve of most of his bike shirts.)

  But no matter how many scenarios she crafted in her mind, the bottom line was that he was still late.

  He spoke enough Vietnamese to ask directions on the street and order dinner in a restaurant—though the waitstaff had spoken English at every spot they had dined as a group on the bike tour—and when he’d had a tailor make him a suit in Hoi An, he had started to speak to the tailor and his two young female assistants in Vietnamese, but it was clear early on that they were being polite and indulging him. They saw so many Western tourists that they spoke a little German and French, as well as the King’s English, and soon they all stopped the charade and it was as if he were ordering a suit at a tony Manhattan department store. The same had occurred when he’d had her fitted for a black and silver cheongsam—this one cut so short it was like a chemise—the neck hole so tight it was like a dog collar. She couldn’t imagine in reality that she’d ever wear it as anything but foreplay. Both outfits were going to be delivered to the hotel that night.

  In any case, she presumed, he could probably ask his way here in Vietnamese in a pinch. In her mind, she saw him smiling and asking a farmer or an old woman or a waiter, “Da Nang?” “Hoi An?” and pointing in one direction or another.

  She pulled off her ball cap and adjusted her ponytail. He would tease her about her anxiety when he returned; she would chastise him for making her worry.

  And she would remind him that they met when she dug a bullet out of his arm, so she would always have cause for alarm when it came to him. For worry. He was who he was. One time, he’d been biking in the Adirondacks and hit fifty-five miles per hour on a long, steep downhill into Keene Valley, passing logging trucks and then UPS trucks and then a guy in a Lexus. She had heard the story from a cycling acquaintance of his that past summer, who told her that he had beaten the rest of the riders to the bottom of the hill by minutes. Literally, minutes. A year ago, the first time he had come to Vietnam on a bike tour, he’d nearly driven the tour guides mad one night by disappearing for three hours after dinner in Ho Chi Minh City. They’d actually waited up for him in the hotel bar. They’d been moments from calling the police and the American consulate when he finally returned. His excuse? Just exploring the city. He’d met three French bicyclists, and they’d compared notes on the different stages and mountains in the Tour de France, because they had all biked them for fun at some point in their cycling lives.

  She had brought to the pool, along with her magazines and her iPad and phone, the map for the day with the two possible bike routes. There were eight of them on the bike tour, a smaller group than usual, apparently, and today they’d been allowed to choose rides of twenty-four and thirty-nine miles. She stared at it now, even though she knew that he would only be on the route at the very end. He wasn’t doing either ride. Yesterday the group had planned to ride the Hai Van Pass over the mountain, a thirty-five-mile route along Highway One and the only real climb on the itinerary: twenty-three hundred feet of ascent. Austin had been looking forward to it immensely, in small part because of the exertion, but mostly because of the pilgrimage. The road would take him near where his father had been wounded and his uncle had died in what the Americans called the Vietnam War and the Vietnamese called the American War. Unfortunately, it had poured all day long and the tour leaders wanted no one—not even a rider as experienced as Austin—biking down the tortuous, steep slope of the mountain in the rain. The road would be too slick and the descent too dangerous. And so the whole group had taken the van from the hotel in Hue to their next stop on the outskirts of Hoi An, and gone shopping there in the City of Lanterns. It was when Austin had bought his suit and picked out her dress.

  Now, today, Austin was doing the ride in reverse and doubling the ascent by riding north over the mountain to the Hue side, and then back over it and through Da Nang to their little hotel near Hoi An. It would be a ride of about seventy miles and forty-six hundred feet, which was grueling and long, but not all that grueling and long for him. He did at least a half dozen rides that distance every summer. He did at least two centuries—rides of a hundred miles. And the forecast today had been nothing but sun with the temperature in the high seventies. It was a perfect afternoon for him to stretch it out and get what he called that good wobbly feeling in his legs at the end of a lengthy, exhausting ride. It was the perfect day for him to pay his respects, the cerulean skies a sign that he was meant, finally, to visit the corner of the world that in so many ways had defined his father’s life. Austin’s wasn’t a military family, but it was a family of privilege and responsibility where it was expected fifty years ago that you did your duty when you were asked: both of his grandfathers had served in the European theater in the Second World War, both had survived, and both had gone on to esteemed (and lucrative) careers in different facets of banking. And so when Austin’s father’s number came up in the lottery in 1970 and he was drafted, he went. He postponed his freshman year at Bates by, in the end, three years. His brother, four years his senior and a newly minted graduate of Syracuse, enlisted, because he couldn’t imagine his younger brother in the jungles without him. It didn’t seem fair. He was sent to Fort Benning and Officer Candidate School, where he would leave a lieutenant and be given command of a forty-three-person rifle platoon almost upon touching down in what was then South Vietnam.

  Alexis knew Austin had not felt the same pressure or evidenced any desire to enlist thirteen years earlier, when he’d finished college. At the time, America had been trying desperately to extricate itself from Iraq and determine whether it would ever be possible to leave Afghanistan. And Austin? He once told her—and it had felt like a confession, the way he had shaken his head ruefully—that he wasn’t his father and his uncle. He simply wasn’t hardwired that way.

  Alexis sighed when she imagined those siblings, so close that they went to a spectacularly unpopular war together.

  She wished she had demanded of Austin that he let her accompany him on his ride today. But she also knew that her body probably wouldn’t have forgiven her if she’d tried to ride the seventy miles and forty-six hundred feet of climb with him. And, of course, she would have slowed him down. She could barely keep up with him on even the shorter rides; he was always pulling a little ahead, realizing how far behind him she was, and doubling back. And so along with the two single women in the group and a pair of married accountants, today Alexis had done the long ride: thirty-nine miles. Only the elderly couple from North Carolina, the Coopers, had done the shorter, twenty-four-mile route, but that was more because Alan Cooper wanted to spend the afternoon at some nearby bird sanctuary than because they were incapable of riding farther. They were in their early seventies but stupendously well preserved. If she lived another forty years, she hoped she’d be half that together.

  The night before they had left for Vietnam, a guy roughly Alan’s age had been brought in to the ER just after dinner with an intracerebral hemorrhage. He’
d collapsed at the dining room table, spilling his wine and toppling a tower of polenta and basil and sliced tomatoes, and was long unconscious by the time the EMTs arrived. She suspected instantly that’s what it was, and that the poor man’s brain was quite literally drowning in blood. The CT scan confirmed it. It was clear that emergency surgery was necessary and even if the fellow survived, he was likely going to be a vegetable when they were done. But she kept him alive until the family could all arrive or at least be allowed to weigh in long distance on how to proceed. They decided on the surgery, which was fine, and Alexis had learned the next morning, when she’d called the hospital before leaving for the airport, that the old man had died in the OR. The memory made her love the idea that the Coopers were on a bike trip in Vietnam. You just never knew when a stroke was going to leave you a stringless marionette on the dining floor beside the half-eaten remains of your supper.

  Until Austin had suggested this trip over the Fourth of July weekend, she hadn’t imagined that she’d ever ride a bike again, other than the Citi Bikes she rented every so often when she was exploring an outer borough or distant corner of Manhattan for fun. (If there was ever a pandemic in New York City, a nurse in the ER had once joked to her, it would be attributable to the great seas of germs on the handles and the seats of those bikes.) But she was young and in good shape, and the extra spinning classes that autumn had made this adventure surprisingly easy. Her legs had been a little tired the first night and her knees a little sore, but she had settled in since then and felt just fine.

  Giang, the local leader of the group, had offered to ride with Austin that day, but he’d insisted on going solo since he was the only tourist interested in the route. One of the two American leaders from the bike tour, a cyclist from the company named Scott, had chimed in that he’d feel better if he tagged along. But Scott’s knee looked pretty swollen and sore from a fall the day before. And Austin was clear that he could manage it physically and he was adamant—stubborn—in his desire to make this trek alone. The route would skirt both the rice paddies where Austin said that his father had been wounded and the patch of jungle where his uncle had died, and he wanted to pay his respects in solitude. It was an emotional expedition and the principal reason why they had come to Vietnam in the first place—or, to be precise, why he had come back. Last year the rains had also intervened, a storm that was relentless and violent and had lasted three days, and he had never made it to either spot. He and the tour had hung out at the resort on the beach, getting treatments at the spa and watching the winds bend the palm trees from their luxurious little villas by the sea. And so Giang and Scott had indulged Austin this year—or, at least, chosen not to fight him. Scott rode with the couple from North Carolina on the short loop, and Giang and the other American tour leader, a woman from Vermont named Colleen, joined the rest of the group on the longer ride. One support van dropped off the Coopers and Scott here at the hotel, and another babysat the rest of the tour on the remainder of the thirty-nine-mile ride.

  She decided to call Austin now and, as she expected, she got his voice mail. “Hi, honey,” she said. “It’s me. It’s nearly four thirty. I’m worried. Where the F are you?”

  After hanging up, for a long moment she stared at the image of him she had added a month ago to her home screen. He had a little black scruff on his cheeks in the image, and it made him look so much more bohemian than he appeared when she would see him, always clean-shaven and in a suit, in a corridor or the cafeteria at the hospital when they would grab a quick bite together. Then she stood and slipped her feet into her sandals and started up the steps to the villa—a working farm long ago, then the magnificent estate of a French diplomat, and now an elegant little hotel—planning to find Giang or Scott or Colleen. Giang was her age, early thirties and, like her boyfriend, he was tall and lean, except for his calves and thighs, which were muscular and almost (but not quite) thick. Colleen was in her late twenties, new to this tour company, but an avid cyclist who had a degree in international relations from Bucknell. (Austin had joked that she was a spy. Traveling around the world leading bike tours? What a perfect cover!) Scott was in his midfifties, short and stocky with a body that just wasn’t built for bike shorts. And yet this was what he did. Tomorrow was the last leg of the tour, the ride south toward Tam Ky. Half the group, including Alexis and Austin, were scheduled to fly home on Saturday. Others were going to continue exploring Asia on their own.

  She found Scott in the living room that had been converted into a wine bar, chatting with the two unattached women from St. Louis. They were a decade older than she was, one was divorced, and the pair had been friends since childhood. Like Austin, they were beasts on their bikes. They were tall and slender and the sort of cyclists who could destroy a mere mortal’s self-esteem in a spin class. They were leaning forward on a long red leather settee, their knees bent, their bare feet flat on the floor; Scott was perched against an exquisitely sculpted antique desk that probably weighed more than a car. His knee was not wrapped in ice, but she saw a blue gel pack, now thawed, sitting on the Oriental rug like a beached jellyfish. The desk was walnut and had carvings of angels and saints on the front, and the corners were as ornate as anything one might see at a cathedral in France or a duomo in Tuscany. The wood matched the bookcases along the walls, the books shelved there a combination of dog-earred paperbacks left by previous guests, mostly in English but some in French and some in Chinese, and beautiful leather binders dating back a century that chronicled the estate’s fruit business from the era before the war.

  “Ah, Alexis,” said Scott, smiling. “I’m guessing Austin’s returned.”

  Alexis and Austin. Austin and Alexis. People who knew the two of them seemed to like the alliteration of their two names and the fact they were usually in such intensely close proximity when they would go out in groups to restaurants or bars in Brooklyn or Manhattan, or when they would be at parties. Sometimes it surprised people that they didn’t actually live together. Yet.

  Because, of course, someday they would. It seemed likely. It crossed her mind; it had to have crossed his. They’d been dating nearly seven months now.

  Scott was fluent in at least three languages—Italian, English, and French—because he also helped lead bike tours for the company in Europe. His Vietnamese was solidly conversational, because they had more and more riders wanting to come here, and because the company had so many repeat customers who had already ridden the roads in Normandy and Ireland and Umbria. He said he couldn’t write a word of Vietnamese, but he had impressed the heck out of her when they had stopped in small villages and he would chat with the locals. He had grown up in Savannah, Georgia, and still had a trace of a southern accent, and that made the pairing of their names—Alexis and Austin, Austin and Alexis—downright mellifluous.

  “No, he’s not back,” she corrected him.

  “Oh, God, how many extra miles is he doing?” asked Talia. “Wasn’t seventy going to be enough for him?” She’d showered, her tight cornrows still damp, and was in a pair of black gym shorts, and her legs, even bent at the knees, went on forever. She shook her head and then sipped her wine.

  “I don’t know what’s happened, but something’s wrong,” Alexis told Scott, aware of the quaver that had crept into her voice, and she watched how instantly he stood up a little straighter. “I mean, I think something’s wrong.”

  “Go on.”

  “He’s not back and he thought he’d be back by three. Three thirty at the latest. That was an hour ago.”

  “And you haven’t heard from him?”

  “Nothing. Not a peep.”

  Reflexively the guide looked at his watch. “Yup, he’s late all right. But he was climbing the Hai Van Pass—twice. Up and over and then back. There are some really steep grades, and I know he wanted to pay his respects on the other side. I told him, when we looked at the maps, that I thought that little detour on the far side was going to de
mand three or four miles on dirt. Or six or eight miles total. That might have slowed him, given all the rain we had yesterday. Maybe there’s a little mud.”

  She shook her head. “You’ve seen him ride. You said yourself he’d be here well before three thirty. And there hasn’t been any rain today, none at all. I’m sure it dried out nicely in the heat. He said he’d only get back that late in the afternoon because he’d probably stop and have a cup of coffee or a beer after visiting the sites.”

  “Have you texted him?”

  “Of course. A bunch of times. I just left him a phone message.”

  Talia went to the credenza against the wall and brought an open bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon and a glass to her. “Here, have a glass of wine,” she said, handing her the goblet. Alexis took it and watched as the woman gave her a hefty pour. Sheri, the other rider, rose as well and stood beside her.

  “I’m guessing you’re not in the habit of letting your guests bike on their own,” Sheri said. She was a lawyer, and Alexis couldn’t miss the disapproval in her tone. She was suggesting that this was not just an irresponsible decision on Scott and Giang’s part; it might have disastrous legal ramifications for the touring company if, indeed, something had happened to Austin.