The Red Lotus

by Chris Bohjalian

  Finally, she turned around and surveyed the room. She wiped her eyes. From where she stood, she could see into the kitchen as well. Most of the things in the apartment were tasteful. The problem, she had teased him on occasion, was how badly everything fit together. The couch and the chairs around the small dining table were black leather and modern, the shapes from a futuristic sci-fi movie. Meanwhile, he had decorated the walls with five classic cartoon cells, each impeccably framed behind archival glass, four of which were Looney Tunes images of Bugs Bunny and Marvin the Martian, but one was a drawing of the Grinch from the original 1966 production that he’d insisted was worth thousands. He’d loved the Grinch. Told her once he couldn’t wait to watch the original with her over Christmas. She’d observed they could watch it right now, online, and he’d replied, no, no, you had to watch it live on network television in the weeks before Christmas, as if it were 1970. That was the ritual and that was what made it wonderful.

  They’d never gotten to do that together. Now they never would.

  There was also a love seat with a dark floral slipcover: Victorian, he had told her, and it had once belonged to his grandparents. There was a barnwood coffee table that matched neither the couch nor the love seat nor the prints on the walls. Twice they’d sat on the floor beside it and eaten Mexican takeout off of it. He had tile coasters with prints from the 1964 World’s Fair in Queens, including one of the Unisphere amidst its fountains, and they were in their usual spots on the side tables on either side of the couch. The remotes for the television were in their usual spot on the small shelf beside the TV. On one of the side tables was a photo of his parents and him in windbreakers beside a bright-red sugar maple in the autumn. They were in the shade, and his father’s face was partly hidden by the bill of a Red Sox baseball cap. When she studied the man now, he looked more like Austin’s grandfather than his father, but Alexis had known that he’d married late and had children late; his wife did look eight years younger than her husband. And that made sense, since even if he had only been—and the expression Captain Nguyen had used came back to her now—a Rear Echelon Mother Fucker, he had still served in Vietnam.

  She realized two things as she stood there: First, that nothing seemed different to her. Nothing looked changed. The second was that this was a fool’s errand. She didn’t know what she was looking for, if anything, and if there was something here that might shed some light on what had happened to Austin, Oscar had likely removed it when he had been here yesterday afternoon.

  Still, she sighed and pressed on. Maybe this was a Hollywood code she was performing for herself: going through the motions to satisfy some longing for closure.

  His bedroom was tiny, barely big enough for his bed—which was, she’d always been grateful when they’d spent the night here, a queen—a dresser, and a small black lacquer desk. But, God, how lovely had it been in the summer to lie there beside him, the air conditioning a lulling hum, a hint of dampness on their bare skin, always (it seemed) her left thigh curled atop his leg, her cheek against his chest. She wouldn’t move until it was clear that his arm, wrapped beneath her, had gone to sleep.

  Before leaving for Vietnam, he had pulled the comforter up to the pillows and smoothed it in a half-assed, single male sort of way. She sat down on the mattress and laid her head on the side of the bed he slept on when they slept here together. On the pillow. On his pillow. Finally, she could inhale him. His scent. Yes, the apartment was musty and empty, but here he was. She had, at last, found him—at least a trace. Again, she felt her eyes growing moist. This time she didn’t fight it and she didn’t wipe the tears away. She let the pillowcase sponge them up.

  * * *

  . . .

  Austin hadn’t owned a desktop computer, and so the surface of the desk in his bedroom usually had nothing upon it but catalogs, junk mail, and development materials from the hospital. Brochures, presentations. That was the case right now, she saw when she had regained her composure. There was the framed photo of the two of them he liked that had been taken at a party in Montauk in July. They were in bathing suits around a fire pit at dusk; it looked to her like a still from a beer commercial, but she understood why it made him happy. In the background were a few of her friends. She picked it up and examined it closely. You could see some of the scars on one of her thighs. Usually she would have wrapped a towel around her waist to hide the scars there, but she had been so happily tipsy that evening that she hadn’t bothered. Thank God, she was wearing a tank suit. No, there was no need to thank God; she hadn’t worn a bikini in years and never would again. Her abdomen had often been a target of hers, some scars low—a cesarean affectation—but others circling her navel the way lions might surround a baby zebra.

  Her friends, she thought. They never saw his friends. Or hardly ever. There were people he’d mention, and two or three times she had been able to put a face and a trace of a personality to a name when they would meet at a bar. But their social life was either just the two of them or the two of them and some of her pals or the two of them at an event involving the hospital and fund-raising.

  On the floor, beneath the desk, was a printer, which was linked via Wi-Fi to his laptop. The printing tray empty.

  She went through the desk drawers, but the most interesting thing she found was his checkbook. Like her, she saw he really wrote very few checks. He paid most bills online. There was nothing there that either puzzled or surprised her.

  She rummaged through his dresser: his casual shirts and sweaters, some of which she had given him, his underwear and socks. She pulled aside the suits and dress shirts that were hung in his closet and saw his rack with his neckties, including one she had given him a month ago. She found his condoms. Even though she was on the pill, she’d insisted he use condoms their first three months together. He worked in a hospital and was fine with that. He wanted to wear them, as well.

  The bathroom revealed nothing she hadn’t expected: no prescription drugs at all, nothing hidden behind the stack of bath towels or under the sink.

  She returned to the kitchen and scanned the cabinets and the pantry, but she really wasn’t sure what she was searching for and came across nothing she hadn’t expected, except for the confirmation that he really did like his olive oil. She saw three different kinds, including the basil-infused olive oil he’d used when he’d made them a delicious pesto a month ago. They’d eaten it by candlelight. He was an attentive chef and an attentive lover.

  And he might have been a liar. She could not lose sight of that.

  But she also could not lose sight of the possibility that he had had a good reason to lie. It was, perhaps, why she was here now in his apartment. She owed it to him to find out the truth—to find out what really had happened to him.

  Most of the front hall was taken up with his bicycle and bicycle gear. She went there and gazed at the bike before leaving. Usually his helmet and shoes would have been there, too. There was a small white cabinet in which he kept his jerseys, his shorts, his gloves, and his energy gels. Sometimes he kept his keys there so he wouldn’t forget them. Now the top of it was empty. She turned on the hall light and knelt down in front of the cabinet. She looked at the dust upon it—or, specifically, the section where no dust had accumulated in the nearly two weeks he had been gone. She couldn’t be sure, but she thought it was possible that whatever Oscar had taken had been a rectangle perhaps seven or eight inches wide and ten or eleven inches long, and it had been sitting right here.

  With her camera, she leaned over and snapped a photo of this, too.

  She looked at the image to see if the dust pattern was clear and saw that it was. She used her thumb and index finger to expand the image, and when she did, she noticed there was something behind the cabinet. Some papers, maybe. She put her phone down on the floor, reached behind the wood, and with her fingertips grabbed three pieces of printer paper. Either Austin had printed something at work and brou
ght it home, or he’d printed something in his bedroom and planned to bring it to work—and it had fallen behind the cabinet. It was possible that these papers had been atop the cabinet, and Oscar accidentally had knocked them to the floor. Or, when he’d walked past it, his breeze had blown them there.

  She sat on the hardwood floor and looked at the material. It was a three-page abstract and summary of a much longer academic research paper about Vietnamese rats and the long-term effects of Agent Orange on the animal, and the resistance of their descendants to certain diseases that previously had killed them. It baffled her, and so she folded the papers into a square that fit into her purse and was about to leave.

  But then she decided that she wanted—that she needed—one more thing. She went back to his bedroom and also took with her the framed picture of Austin and her at the party.

  * * *

  . . .

  She was nearing the subway, the framed picture of Austin and her at the beach clutched under her arm and her purse slung over that same shoulder, when her phone rang. She pulled it from her back pants pocket and paused on Lexington Avenue. She knew instantly that it was one of Austin’s parents. She’d called that number from Vietnam and she’d called it again while waiting for the connection in Seoul and she’d even called it earlier today. It seemed oddly fitting that his father or mother was phoning her now, right after she had been in their son’s apartment and smelled him on the pillowcases and heard his voice in her head mimicking the deep baritone of the narrator for the Grinch.

  “Hello?” she began, knowing how tentative her own voice sounded.

  “Is this Alexis?” It was a man, his tone as faltering as hers.

  “It is, yes. Mr. Harper?”

  “Please. I know we’ve never met, but call me Peter.”

  “Okay. Peter. I’m sorry,” she said, and suddenly she was choked up. She hadn’t expected this. How many times had she stood in the hospital waiting room or a hospital corridor and told fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters and children that they had done all they could, they had tried everything, but someone had died? Too often. She understood the anguish and shock he was feeling, and now she was feeling it, too. Again. It was like a roller coaster that seemed never to end. One moment she was functioning, dimly aware of the dread on the ascent, but thinking, and the next she was shrieking inside on the downslope.

  “I know,” he said simply, hearing the way her voice had broken. “I’m sorry we haven’t called you back sooner. But this has been very hard on us, especially his mother.”

  “How is she now?”

  “She’s upstairs, resting. We’re coming to New York tomorrow, and we had to pack. It took a lot out of her—packing.”

  “It does even in the best of times,” Alexis said.

  “And these sure as heck are not the best of times.”

  Other than roughly his age, she knew almost nothing for certain about the man, because Austin had lied about his service in Vietnam. The FBI attaché had said in Hoi An that the family came from old money—and lots of it—but Austin had never implied the family was anything more than comfortable. He’d also said he was an only child. Was even that true?

  Still, she held the photo of Austin and her between her knees so she had a free hand to root inside her purse for a tissue and wiped her cheeks.

  “Have the doctors given her anything?” she asked.

  “We both have a little help, yes,” he replied. “Austin told us you’re an ER doctor.”

  “I am.”

  “And you ID’d the body back in Vietnam, right?”

  She sighed. “That’s right.”

  “I don’t want to know the details, but…thank you. Thank you for doing that.”

  There was so much she wanted to ask him, but she wanted to be careful: she didn’t want to hurt his feelings by not knowing things she would have if Austin hadn’t been hiding something—or, for whatever the reason, been fabricating something. And so she moved gingerly, as if walking on ice.

  “The hospital told me you were coming to town and you were going to stop by Austin’s office. Clean it out, I guess.”

  “That’s right. We’re also going by his apartment. Of course.”

  “Can I join you when you’re at the hospital? I’m working tomorrow, but unless there’s a subway derailment or natural disaster, I should be able to get away for a few minutes. A weekday afternoon is relatively quiet.”

  “Sure. Absolutely. It will be nice to meet you. I know Austin liked you very much.”

  Liked you very much. She tried not to dwell on that. When people liked something very much, it meant that they didn’t love it. If you liked rum raisin ice cream or cheesecake very much, it meant you’d eat it at a dinner party if it was served for dessert, but it wasn’t something you’d order if you had a choice. She knew, for instance, that she loved French toast with real maple syrup and whipped butter, but she only liked pancakes very much—and only then if she was in the right mood.

  “What time do you think that will be?” she asked.

  “I guess it depends on the traffic. We’re driving into the city. But I’m thinking around three thirty or four.”

  “Thank you. Why don’t you text me when you arrive?”

  “Sure.”

  “May I ask you something?” she began cautiously. Austin had said his father was a semi-retired ad man. He no longer worked for an agency in Boston, but he still did some freelance work. This might be safe ground on which to move and test for small, seismic faults.

  “Certainly. Ask me anything.”

  “Are you still in advertising?”

  “Technically, yes. But I left advertising agencies years ago. I’m a consultant now.”

  “What kind of consultant?”

  “I worked a lot in pharmaceuticals, which is a great way to remain employed in a young man’s business after fifty. Now I consult for pharmaceutical companies on their communication strategies. I travel a bit and work from home. But I also garden and ski. I couldn’t do that if I had a regular nine-to-five job.”

  “And your wife?”

  “She’s a professional volunteer, if you know what I mean. She volunteers at the school and the library. She wants to be around children.”

  This made sense. Austin had said she’d recently retired as a school principal.

  “Is it at the same school where she used to work?”

  “No. She worked in a middle school. She volunteers at the elementary school. The kids are cuter. She calls them nuggets. She can read to them. Draw pictures with them. Things like that. Why?”

  “Just curious,” she said. Then: “This could probably wait until tomorrow, but it’s a really big question, and it’s been weighing on me since I first met with the FBI’s legal attaché in Cambodia and Vietnam. Toril Bjornstad. You’ve talked to her, right?”

  “Yes. Three times. Maybe four.”

  “Did she tell you what your son told me—about you and your brother?”

  “No.”

  She took a breath and stood up straight, a reflex: it was her pose for delivering bad news in the ER. “Austin told me that you and your brother had both been soldiers in Vietnam. In the war. He’d said your brother had died there and you’d been wounded. Austin was alone the day he was killed, and he went riding alone because, supposedly, he was making a pilgrimage to the sites—roughly—where his uncle had died and where you were wounded.”

  There was silence at the other end of the phone. “Peter?” she said finally, when the quiet had gone on for seconds.

  “Just digesting that,” he said carefully.

  “I understand.”

  “I mean, we talked about Vietnam before he went last year and before he went this year. But he was nowhere near where his uncle or I were stationed the day he was hit by the truck—or whatever ran into him.
”

  “You were wounded at Long Binh—near Ho Chi Minh City. Is that right?”

  “You keep saying ‘wounded,’ and wounded isn’t exactly the right word. It implies that it was combat related.”

  “It wasn’t?” she asked, with a twinge of guilt at the way she was leading him on since she knew the truth.

  “God, no. I was in a—what do they call them…”

  She waited until he found the right word.

  “A go-cart,” he continued finally. “I crashed the damn thing into a side wall. It was like a clown car, but without a roof. There were five of us crammed into it. We were kids screwing around. And I was injured. Broke my hip and my leg. But it wasn’t exactly a Purple Heart–worthy wound,” he said.

  “And Austin knew that?”

  “Why wouldn’t he?”

  “And your brother?” Alexis asked.

  “Yes, he was KIA. That’s true. Killed in action. But he was north of where you all were biking. Austin was nowhere near there when he was killed.”

  “And you’re absolutely positive that Austin was aware of this—of all of this?”

  “Of course he was. It’s not like his uncle and I were spies. We had a real soldier and a real paper pusher. I was the paper pusher.”

  And a lifeguard, she thought to herself.

  “I was the lucky one,” he continued. “Obviously. But it’s not like we were hiding anything.”

  “He…”

  “Go ahead,” said Peter.