Dragonfish

part two

On our second night at sea, you disappeared. I awoke and found your shorts by my side and had to keep from screaming your name. Where could you have gone with all the sleeping bodies around us? I’d seen a few mothers tie string from their wrists to their child’s wrists, and I cursed myself for my laziness.

Then I saw you, and it was like seeing a ghost. You were outside the boat looking in, calmly holding on to the gunwale as though you were ready to let go, as though you were levitating. I grabbed your arms and hauled you back inside. You were naked from the waist down. I looked over the gunwale and realized that you had been squatting over the sea, balanced on some wooden trim along the side of the boat, all to avoid the boat’s latrine, which apparently frightened you more than falling into the sea.

You flinched when I touched your cheek. I must have been glaring at you as if I was ready to spank you. But my heart was pounding. If you had fallen overboard, no one could have known. The night would have swallowed you whole. Your presence now seemed such a miracle that I was overcome with shame at having ever wished you away. I loved you more in that moment than at any other moment in your life. I cradled your head, smoothed your brow, and won dered what had possessed me those last few days. Don’t ever do that again, I told you, but I was saying it to myself. I held you fast until you slept and did not close my eyes until images of your death faded into the night.

There are things that people do poorly for lack of talent, and things they do poorly for lack of desire. Then there are those things that all the desire and talent in the world cannot make possible, cannot make fit, no matter how often you pray and how hard you pretend.

On the day you were born, I lost my voice. Words came out like gasps, and during labor my pain had no sound. The nurse held my hand.

Your father had been gone for five months, vanished without a word, and no one knew if he had fled the country or been imprisoned or if he was even alive.

You must have sensed it. A baby’s cries at birth are full of vigor, but yours were weak and willful, a stubborn crying, as though you were already disappointed in me and mourning him.

When I held you for the first time, you refused to nurse. You struggled in my arms and kept crying softly. Even when my voice came back, I found I had nothing to say. I remember a deep, instant love for you that felt like a locked room inside me. It’s only now as I write this, as I say these words to myself, that I begin to understand it.

I wonder what you remember of our fifth night, when that strange tragedy began. It was a moonless night, the darkest so far of our trip. A woman began wailing and awoke the entire boat. Where is my son? she shrieked. My son is gone!

The engine stopped and lanterns were lit. People were already looking overboard. Although a few men stood ready to jump into the sea, we all knew there was no sense in it. We had only just stopped the boat, and the calm black waters around us showed no sign of anything. If the boy had fallen in, it was already too late.

People were consoling the mother, restraining her. Like me, she had no one else on the boat but her child.

I remember him. He spent most of the first day retching into a plastic bag as she stroked his hair and patted his back. The yellow stains on his T-shirt were still visible the last time I saw him. He was your age, your height, thin and sickly, and his disappearance cruelly echoed what might have happened to you three nights before. What I had miraculously avoided, this woman was now suffering.

People searched every corner of the boat. There was no trace of the boy. The captain finally restarted the engine, which got the woman screaming again. No! No! You can’t leave him behind! I must find him first!

Somehow you had remained asleep through all of this. But now you were wide awake and clutching my shirt. Why is she screaming? you asked me. I had no idea what to say and could only turn you away and cover your ears, but you peeled off my hands and repeated your question until I finally snapped at you. Even as the shadows obscured her, you kept staring.

She wept for hours. We could hear her over the boat’s engine, moaning in the darkness. No one could comfort her, and no one could sleep, not even you. As her fits turned hysterical, my pity for her was replaced with something like hatred. At one point I even considered quieting her by force, but at dawn she suddenly stopped, exhausted apparently, and people at last were able to fall asleep.

It rained late that morning. Everyone’s mood improved. We collected rainwater in as many containers as we could find, and the storm was cool and soothing after days of scorching weather.

I watched you sit nearby with two older kids. It surprised me, since you rarely played with other children, or with anyone for that matter. But then you went still as you faced the stern of the boat. I figured you had grown bored, as you often did in the company of others. You were drenched in the rain, your hair matted on your forehead, your eyes salty.

Someone screamed. By the time I turned around, I caught only a flash of the woman’s head and arms disappearing overboard in the haze of rain. You must have seen everything, her climbing onto the gunwale and standing there for a heartbeat, for one final breath, before leaping into the sea.

Two men dove in after her. The boat again was stopped. The storm had gotten worse and it took some effort just to get the two men back on board. Neither had seen or laid a finger on anything.

The boat was quiet for hours save the sound of the engine and the old women reciting their rosaries. I prayed alongside them, but only for the boy.

I remember the minutes after it happened, when people peered overboard and waited breathlessly for the swimmers to come back up with the woman’s body, and all I could think was how melodramatic it was, how cowardly. She had no right giving up. To come all this way, and then to do that.

It turned out, of course, that she died for nothing. Hours later, someone below decks lifted the tarp that covered the fuel store and found the boy wedged between the twenty-gallon cans, lying amid a pile of filthy gasoline-soaked rags. He had a burning fever and could barely move or make a sound. Who knows why he had wandered down into the hold that night, or how he even got there, weak as he was. He must have passed out beneath the tarp, hidden from people lying arm’s length from him, and deaf to his mother wailing his name for hours.

He was carried above deck where two older women forced water down his throat, cooled his forehead with a damp rag, and rubbed hot oil over his chest. I prayed for his recovery, yet dreaded it. What would we say when he was strong enough to ask for his mother?

He ended up surviving the boat trip somehow, despite hardly moving for the final four days. Once we made it to the camp, he disappeared onto the floating hospital, that white ship moored off the island’s shore, and we heard three months later that he recovered and was sponsored by his uncle in Australia.

He’d be a grown man now, with children of his own and stories about his childhood that he might not be able or willing to tell. He’s probably forgotten what his mother looked like. I still remember, more than I want to, her writhing in the arms of a consoler, tearing at her white blouse until the neckline ripped, her long equine face crumpled behind the tangles of her hair, mouth ajar and eyes clenched shut, that howling mask.

She must have felt she lost everything when she thought her son was gone. Until then, she had only lived for him. What was she now to herself or to the world if she was no longer a mother to anyone?

It was shame that welled inside me after they found the boy that day. I imagined myself losing you, and realized that I could not have done what she had done. I would have mourned you for the rest of my life, there is no doubt, but your death would not have been, back then, the death of anything inside me.

As I write down these thoughts, I wonder if you can read Vietnamese, if any of these words make sense or if they are as foreign to you as the sound of my voice. It is the only way I can speak honestly to you because it is the only language, the only world, in which I truly exist. I wish that weren’t so. I’ve always wanted it otherwise. My suspicion is that you’ve grown up to see things as an American would and that you live your life for yourself alone. It saddens me that you might be so distant from the world I still dream about every night, but I feel envy for you too and a strange relief.

A few months ago, I came across the jade rosary your father gave me when we first got together, tucked away and forgotten in an old cigar box of trinkets I saved from the refugee camp. I had clutched that rosary all nine days we were at sea. You once wore it like a necklace, sitting startled on our bed in Vietnam and gaping at your father, who took the photograph. It was black and white, bent and tattered from the trip across the ocean. I discarded it years ago, along with all the others.

I have wondered often if you’ve grown into some version of me or become someone entirely different, someone better. In my mind, I can only see you as your five-year-old self. Your pursed lips and cracked brow. Your eyes always bruised with thought. When you were angry, curious, you glared at people until they either looked away or scolded you. When you were pensive, you wandered into yourself like a lonely old woman.

People said that you resembled me in every way, that even at a month old, you already had my eyes, my cheekbones, and most of all my temper. Something about our likeness to each other bothered me back then. It was as though you had come into the world to remind me constantly of myself.

Your grandmother always said that I was the most stubborn, the most selfish, of her three daughters. Growing up, I never shared sweets or toys with my sisters and constantly argued with them, sometimes hitting them since I thought it was my right as the oldest. I talked back to everyone, even your grandfather, a former soldier who had cut men’s throats and spent days on the jungle floor listening for enemy footsteps. He spanked me often for my loose mouth, though secretly, I believe, he admired it.

He used to hit us with a wooden rod as thick as his finger. We’d stand before him in the family room, arms crossed, and confess our offense, and after he told us how many rods we deserved, we would have to turn around and face the wall and await them. If we uncrossed our arms or tried to dodge them, it would earn us an extra blow.

One time, when I was ten, I refused to bow and apologize to him after getting five rods for breaking the porcelain Jesus on our family altar. I had been running in the house, but only in order to rush and answer my mother’s call. Why am I being punished for an accident? I demanded through my tears, I didn’t break Jesus on purpose! My outburst startled him, but only for a second. A sixth rod nearly buckled my legs. When I still refused to bow, he hit me twice more until I bled through my shorts.

That night, when everyone had fallen asleep, I retrieved the rod from its home atop the bookcase and brought it out to our front porch, where I set it on fire with his matches. I watched it burn, then stomped on it. I left it there on the porch in three charred pieces, right by his smoking bench, fully aware that he was always first to rise and that smoking was the very first thing he did. When I came out the next morning, the mess had been swept away. He must have suspected that I had done it, but he never said a word. Two days later I saw a brand-new rod atop the bookcase.

Your grandmother liked to say that I was the fearless one in the family, that I would challenge the Lord if I ever met him. It was a compliment, but also a criticism of my temperament, which I suppose made her blind to everything I was actually afraid of.

The rosary also reminded me, of course, of your father. Not that I still yearn for him. I am not so romantic as that. It’s just the way of memory and loss. We never truly forget the things that have passed out of our lives. We merely move further away from them in time, until they become either less important than they actually were or more profound than we might have ever imagined.

Had your father lived, I would never have left you. What happened on the island would never have happened. And of course I would not be writing these words. I know it sounds ridiculous to attribute all these things to one event, to one person, but that is how I have always seen it.

He was a farmer’s son, your father, and a captain in the air force. He grew up raising ducks and pigs, and by the time he met me he had authority over hundreds of men.

I was seventeen the first time he arrived at our house in his perfectly pressed olive uniform, accompanying a fellow soldier who was pursuing one of my sisters. They drank tea with your grandparents for two hours.

It was not his uniform or his stature that impressed me. Everything about your father was easy. The way he smiled and sat back in his chair and seemed to know everything about every topic. The way he asked questions as though your grandparents were the most interesting people in the world. They soon ignored his friend and started boasting to him of my sisters’ talents at school and in the kitchen, and of my skill at cutting hair. Your father nodded politely and never once looked at me. Although he was only twenty-four at the time, he seemed as old to me as your grandfather.

Two days later he returned alone with a tin of French biscuits. He was on his way to work at the Saigon airport, yet still spent an hour visiting with my parents. They spoke mostly about religion, your grandmother’s favorite subject, and about the war, your grandfather’s. I understand now that what impressed them, what impressed most everyone who met your father, was the certainty of everything he felt. He offered it to people not as a criticism or a play for superiority, but as a gift, as though he were a soldier offering safety, a priest offering forgiveness.

For more than two weeks, he stopped by every few days on his way to work. Always in uniform, always with a gift of cookies or candy, and never noticing me as I served him his tea. My parents wondered if he was interested in any of us. We soon just figured he enjoyed the company. He even started talking to me and my sisters, though he showed none of us any special attention. Everyone agreed that he carried a casual kind of loneliness.

Then one day he came with a carton of American cigarettes for your grandfather and a bundle of expensive silk for your grandmother. But instead of sitting down with them on the couch, he remained standing and asked them if I could accompany him to Saigon for lunch. His manner was as casual as if he was asking for a glass of water, despite everyone’s surprise, not least of all my own.

I thought his interest in me had come out of his visits, but at that first lunch in Saigon, he asked me questions as if he had been storing them up for those last two weeks. He confessed that he had loved me since the moment he stepped into our house, which frightened me at first, that someone could just love you so completely before you’d had a chance to return any of it. I realized that befriending your grandparents had been your father’s way of ensuring that he was the best man for me in their eyes, and that he already knew that my love for him was inevitable. I should have been offended, but something about that moved me deeply.

He gave me the jade rosary that afternoon, a peculiar first gift, particularly as a profession of love. I suspect now that he already saw me as a creature of faith. He had no idea how wrong he was.

We married five months later, in late 1974, when I was eighteen. I moved to his base in Pleiku, and despite the distance from my family and my home, despite my inexperience in almost everything, I was somehow never too afraid. In no time at all, he taught me how to take care of him, how to love him and be loved by him, how to believe in this entity we’d become as man and wife, even though I wondered where his own understanding of these things had come from. It was as though he’d been a grown man and a husband since the day he was born.

We set up a simple home in the barracks, with two twin beds pushed together and a modest bathroom and kitchen your father built himself. He worked at his office during the day, but we spent our evenings together, reading the newspaper or an old novel to each other, or hosting his officer friends, who came for my cooking and stayed for mah-jongg and poker. Your father rarely lost. On the weekends, we walked to town to see a movie and always enjoyed the ones with Charles Bronson or Alain Delon, who both talked very little and always got the job done. On Sundays we strolled up the hill, along a path that skirted a mango orchard, and went to church.

I struggle now with the idea that those days could’ve lasted much longer, perhaps even forever. That’s the naive and sometimes dangerous urge in all our memories. What might have been is a vast and depthless ocean that surrounds the tiny island of what actually happened, what was actually possible. You can either die of thirst on that island or wade out into all that endless water.

When I became pregnant with you, just a few months into this life with your father, it was as though I had uncovered a startling secret about myself. It should have felt natural, invigorating, as it would for any woman, but for me it was like a sudden and incurable affliction. I had only recently been given a brand-new version of myself to walk around in, and just when I started to feel comfortable inside it, I was forced into yet another version that seemed not only alien but unbearably permanent. Once you became a reality inside me, I knew I could never go back to being anything else.

Your father, however, immediately wrote his family and went about building a new crib and a bigger dining table, and three or four times a day he playfully caressed my flat belly as though the bump was already there. Before you ever actually existed, you were already the center of his life.

His joy was brief. When I was three months pregnant with you, we moved back to Cat Lai to await the Communists. He had already decided long ago, without telling me, that he would never flee the country, that as the oldest son he would stay and bear his responsibility to the family.

On the day Saigon fell, as your father’s family and I sat in the basement with the buried gold and listened to the radio and the screaming missiles overhead, your father put his ear to my belly and, to you or to me or perhaps to himself, murmured a lullaby in the darkness,

The lights in Saigon — some green, some red.

The lights in My Tho — some bright, some dim.

Go back now to your books and learn patience.

Nine moons I shall wait for you, ten autumns I shall wait for you.

By noon that day, he was nothing more than a farmer’s son.

But the Communists knew everything. He was immediately forced to attend their weekly meetings in the town square. He had to bring his own chair and mosquito net, as well as the reeducation booklet they provided. Not once did he look afraid. You would have thought he enjoyed studying the booklet. Each time he went, I refused to say good-bye, so he started leaving me with a kiss on the cheek and these grinning words in my ear: If anything happens, I’ll kill a hundred men to get back to you.

On the night of his fifth meeting, he never came home.

That was the first time your father died. For the first two years of your life, I did not know if I should miss him, mourn him, or hope for his return. He existed in some hazy region between death and life, where thinking of him was like choosing between a memory and a ghost. What made it worse was that I could not look at you, as you began teething and walking and settling into your own personality, without also thinking of his absence for all of it, and then hating him for believing any of this was avoidable. So I tried not to think of him at all, until gradually you became a marker for when my life changed from something solid and hopeful to something as unknowable as the sea at night. Perhaps that was when I started blaming you for making me erase him from my life.

Twenty months after his disappearance, the family received a letter. He was alive. It was his handwriting but not him completely. We could tell that they had inspected every single word he wrote, all 155 of them, informing us of what we had both hoped for and dreaded all along. He had been taken to the camps, but they would not let him tell us where or when he would ever come home. Only that he was working hard and honoring his reeducation, whatever that meant. Months passed without any more letters, from him or the authorities. We were left again to imagine the worst.

Finally, at the end of that year, a second letter arrived, this time from the government. He was to be released early for undisclosed reasons.

You were three years old when he returned. He was many shades darker now, his skin leathery and his eyes sallow and dry. He had lost so much weight that he seemed both smaller and taller. What struck me hardest was his smile. I had never seen him smile weakly as if he was uncertain of his happiness, embarrassed by it.

The first time he met you, he held you for a full minute. He wept quietly into your chest, the first time I had ever seen him cry. He was a complete stranger to you, and yet you did not struggle out of his arms as you did with everyone else. You stared at him wide-eyed and with understanding, as though his tearful smile was the first genuine thing you had ever encountered in your life. That night, you slept between us, cradled in his arms.

I asked him many times what had happened in the camps. He’d only say that they worked him hard and fed him next to nothing, and that they had little mercy for slow learners. It was clear from his reticence that he had rejected his reeducation and that that had cost him much more than he was willing to share.

One night, months after his return, I awoke to him crying in bed. The second and last time I saw him cry.

You two must leave, he whispered. Things will get worse.

But I refused to consider it. Not without you, I said.

And that was when he confessed that he was sick. They had diagnosed him in the camps and told him he had a year or less to live. That’s why they had released him early. He was not strong enough to make the trip with us. He’d be a burden. He could even get us killed.

I could barely get the words out. I told him anything could get us killed, and if I were ever to leave without him, it would only be after he was gone. I’d wait until then, no matter how long it took.

He shook his head and stared at the ceiling. He could not bear the thought of his daughter seeing him die.

You must go now for her, he said. I’ll never forgive you if you stay.

Your father died three weeks after we arrived at the refugee camp. He had held on a year longer than anyone expected. I was holding your hand when I read my mother’s telegram. I crumpled it and tossed it away, saying nothing to you, and started for the beach with you in tow, and once there we continued walking along the shore, through the sand and over the rocks, past the jetty and up the tree-lined cliffs as though we were actually headed somewhere, silent the entire time as you tugged at me and said you were tired and didn’t want to walk anymore. But moving was the only thing I could do. The words could not come to my lips, for you or for myself. We walked in an hour-long circle until we came back to our hut and I fell onto the pallet and went instantly to sleep.

I sometimes forget how young your father was. He had always seemed like a much older man, someone I had to catch up to. In the end we were only together a year before he disappeared, and for one more year after he returned. I have spent so much more time missing and remembering him than I ever spent knowing him. Though how long does it take to truly know anyone? Had your father lived, had he crossed the ocean and returned to us, to me, would I still love him now?

His favorite meal was one he cooked himself. A simple pork dish sautéed in fish sauce with a little sugar and pepper and minced ginger. After eight days at sea, when none of us had eaten or drunk anything for days, after we had lost three more people, two of them babies that had to be thrown overboard, our boat stopped dead in the water. We had no more oil or grease for the engine, so the captain mixed some pork fat with gasoline, which got the engine run ning again except the oil smelled so good that people could hardly stand it.

You said, That smells like Father.

This is the part I’ve never told anyone. I swear it is all true.

We met a man on the island. He had been on our boat. A man named Son, whose presence you might remember even if you’ve forgotten everything else about him. On our sixth night at sea, a storm rocked and flung us against each other for hours, thrashed us with blinding choking rain, and in the end took his wife. She had been thrown from the boat when it heeled and nearly capsized, and in the calm after the storm’s passing, whispers traveled of how he had tried to save her but she had slipped from his hands and tumbled into the sea. He was still onboard somewhere with their young son. We heard no moaning or crying of any kind. I imagined him staring silently at the tranquil sea and reliving his last glimpse of his wife as she vanished under the waves.

She was the second woman drowned in less than a day. She had not flung herself and she had not gone willingly, but she and the other woman quickly became one person in my mind. At that point, there was no room left in me for separate tragedies.

Two months into our stay at the camp, with nothing to do one afternoon, I decided to take you to the untainted beach on the other side of the island. The main beach at the mouth of the camp was always crowded with swimmers and barterers and supply boats from the mainland. But this other beach was over an hour’s walk from camp and cut off from all facilities, so few people went there unless they were young, in love, or in need of time alone. The easiest path there was along the base of the mountain, which skirted the shoreline, and we were walking the path that afternoon, about halfway to the beach, when we came upon a wall of trees. You saw something and stopped us, and when I followed you through the trees, I saw that we had discovered a small promontory that overlooked the shore.

You pointed him out to me. We stood at the edge of the promontory, with a quiet view of the untainted beach in the distance and a steep path below us that led down to a small rocky cove. There was a platform of rocks at the bottom, and he was sitting on one of the rocks with a fishing pole he’d made from a tree branch. I’d seen men in the camp sneak out into the open waters on makeshift rafts, or with nothing but a life vest made of empty plastic bottles, risking their lives to catch fish they would then barter around camp. Son’s brand of fishing had no industry. He was there for the silence.

You asked me who he was, and though I had never actually set eyes on Son, not even on the boat, I knew immediately. You can’t live elbow to elbow with thousands of people without hearing stories. Son’s boy was only a few years older than you, and in their first week on the island, some man had improperly touched the boy and threatened him with a knife, so Son confronted the man with a cleaver and hacked off three of his fingers. He left him the thumb and part of the pinkie. That’s what I heard. The man deserved it, I suppose, and everyone agreed that Son was merely protecting the one thing he had left in the world. But still, people kept their distance. The Malaysian police jailed him for two weeks, and some said they shaved his head as punishment. We knew he had already done it himself to mourn his wife’s death.

Let’s go down there, you said.

I hushed you, afraid that he might hear us. But you kept tugging my hand. It had been so long since I’d seen that kind of recognition and vigor in your eyes. Your father, of course, had also shaved off all his hair months before we left, lest you see him lose more and more of it every day.

I want to fish! you insisted.

I was about to cover your mouth when Son turned and saw us. He yanked his pole out of the water and marched halfway up the path until he was a few meters below us. I wanted to flee but stood transfixed by his childish outrage. He seemed embarrassed for some reason, and angry that he could not hide it.

Why are you watching me? he demanded. His voice rang across the empty promontory.

I pulled you close to me, behind me a bit, as you squeezed my hand. I shot back at him, This is not your island! We can be here too if we want!

You were watching me, he insisted and glanced accusingly at you too.

Why would we watch you? We’re here for the same reason you are.

He was taken aback, unsure of what I meant.

I added, And we’ll come back here as often as we want, whether you like it or not! I pulled you from the edge and decided it was better to return to camp. We would save the beach for another day.

As we rushed away, me pulling you along, you kept glancing behind us.

The next day you said you wanted to visit the beach again. I knew why. And I admitted to myself that I was drawn back too. We were poking a wild dog, but something about him felt familiar to me as well. It might have been his recent loss, or simply the frightening loneliness in his anger.

He was fishing at the same spot, accompanied this time by his son, who, like his father, was shirtless and had a pole in the water. They each sat on a separate rock without talking or acknowledging one another.

We watched them in our own rapt silence, though this time from a more concealed spot beneath some trees. It felt strange, the fact that you and I were finally sharing something. I was pleased by it, but also saddened.

The boy jumped to his feet. He had a bite on his line and was trying to lift it carefully out of the water. Son watched him without saying anything. The boy struggled with the pole and seemed on the verge of success, but when he grabbed the line with his hand, it went limp. He turned immediately to his father, who came over to inspect the line and promptly rapped his knuckles on the boy’s crown and admonished him loudly.

The boy sat back down, rubbing his bowed head.

I felt sorry for him. He had seen his mother drown and watched his father lop off another man’s fingers. What must have filled his head at night?

Son returned to his spot and to his fishing and seemed, once again, absorbed in the deep waters of the sea, oblivious again to the boy.

Their bare backs looked bronzed in the sun, the son’s a smaller and more delicate facsimile of the father’s.

We visited the promontory twice more that week. Son and the boy never seemed to change. It was as though we were returning each day to look at a painting.

They fished mostly in silence, but every now and then Son’s loud voice broke upon the air and he’d begin talking at length. He could easily have been talking to himself. I understood very little from our distance, but I could see that the boy, who hardly spoke at all, hung on every word. He clearly feared his father and might have loved and admired him too. How much of that had he inherited from his mother?

Her memory hovered around them. The boy often sat with his face turned toward the sea, the pole forgotten in his hands. The first time I saw him cry, his father scolded him and he had to set down the pole and wipe his eyes with both hands. The other time it happened, Son merely looked over and watched until the boy recovered himself. Then Son started speaking. His tone was even and gentle, whatever he was saying.

I tell you all this because I saw a love there that was circumstantial and yet more real because of it. In another life, had they not lost the woman they both loved, they would not have tried at all.

For as long as an hour, we’d watch them as the trees swayed above us. Once or twice, the boy glanced up in our direction. If he saw us, he made no mention of it to his father.

It was around this time that I started having nightmares of us back on the boat, except it was just the two of us and we were drifting on the ocean, sitting under moonlight by the stern until we heard something crawling up the side of the boat, and finally a wet hand reached over the gunwale.

I also had dreams of you drowning in the nearby well or eaten by rats in the night, or your body washing up on the beach after a terrible storm. Strangely, in the dreams of us on the boat, you were always alive, and in the dreams of us on the island, you were either dead or missing.

Not coincidentally, it was also around this time that you began going off on your own. We shared our hut with seven people, and I would come back from an errand or wake up from a nap and find that you had disappeared without anyone noticing.

The first time it happened, I was frantic, those dreams of you inflaming my worst fears until I finally found you at the chapel watching people pray. I scolded and spanked you. It did no good. You continued your daily excursions into other people’s huts, peeking through the windows of the sick bay, exploring the cemetery on the hill. At sunset one evening, I found you sitting on the beach looking seaward as metal skiffs shimmered on the horizon.

It made no sense. You were hardly five years old but had no fear of being on your own, of getting lost or hurt, of me punishing you. Each time I found you, I seized your arm and shook you and even threatened you, only to have you look up crossly at me as though I had interrupted something important. I began to wonder if you weren’t trying to escape me, or punish me for whatever it was I had done or hidden from you in my heart.

I finally asked you why you were doing this. I did not expect a real answer.

We were inside our hut, and you peered at the empty doorway and murmured to yourself, I was looking for Father.

A voice awoke me one night. I sat up and found everyone in the hut sound asleep.

You were snoring beside me. I had started tying rope from my ankle to yours, to alert me if you ever wandered away at night. I untied it and stepped outside to listen again for the voice.

I walked barefoot around the camp, beneath clear skies and a full moon. Rats the size of cats squeaked along the empty pathways. I heard a few faint voices from nearby huts, though none that sounded like the one that had awoken me. I was aware that I was following a sound from the depths of sleep, yet I felt compelled to hear it again, as if mute and searching for my own voice, and I continued walking until I found myself outside the camp, headed slowly in the direction of the beach.

The sea was calm that night, lapping the empty shore and washing cool and soft over my ankles. I let the swirling sand bury my feet and looked out into the night, past the lonesome jetty, at the gray moonlit waters. Vietnam was somewhere out there. It might as well have been the moon.

A sound drifted toward me, like someone slowly paddling a boat. It was hours past curfew, so I thought at first that a patrol boat had spotted me. But all I saw was a dark figure about twenty meters out in the water, moving parallel to the shore. I started down the beach to get a closer look without wading in any deeper. I made out her long tangled hair, her white blouse drenched and clinging to her skin. The sea was up to her waist, and she was taking one long, slow stride after the other, dragging herself through the water with her head bowed, searching for something in the shallows.

She had not yet noticed me.

Are you okay? I called out to her. She brushed her hands across the surface of the water as though parting curtains.

I called her a second time. She turned around with a start.

Her long face was unmistakable, that howling still there in the stark eyes that regarded me now with outrage and eagerness. She began dragging herself toward me, rising out of the water with her small gray breasts visible beneath the translucent blouse and its neckline ripped and her hair dripping over those outraged eyes. And I saw again in my mind that flash of her head and arms, frozen forever in midair, when she stepped off the gunwale and plunged into the sea.

I wanted to run away, but my feet were planted in the sand.

She stopped about five meters from me. Have you seen my son? she said.

No, I said immediately. I wanted to tell her that he was alive and safe and probably asleep on the floating hospital moored somewhere out there in the darkness, but I was afraid she might make me take her there.

He’s just a little boy, she continued and shook her head. She gestured around her. I can’t seem to find him anywhere out here. Where could he be if he’s not out here?

How did you lose him?

She peered down the shore and said, It feels like forever ago. She started wading away, the water slashing her knees. But then she turned back around. She looked at me carefully. Are you sure you don’t know where he is?

I felt my heart beating again. I have no idea, I told her. I’m sure he’s okay.

Her face turned hard. She said, I don’t care if he’s okay. I left the world because of him and now I find he’s not here with me like he’s supposed to be? Tell me, is that fair?

I shook my head.

She waded away again, this time toward the rocky end of the shore.

What will you do if you find him? I called after her.

She looked over her shoulder, still moving, and said, I’m taking him with me. What else?

My feet shifted finally in the sand and I took a step forward. Wherever she was headed, her son would not be there. Yet I felt compelled to follow her, to see what she would do if she ever did find him. She seemed both terrible and beautiful in the moonlight.

I made the sign of the cross and watched her figure fade slowly into the night until all that was left was the distant sound of sloshing water.

You fell ill with the flu the next day. I brought you to the sick bay and they gave you medicine, but your fever got worse. You spent two days lying on your cardboard pallet, hardly eating a thing. Each time you awoke from a nap, you started crying for your father. No matter how I tried to soothe you, you kept mewling his name.

I understand it now, your love for him. He never scolded you as I did, never lifted his hand at you except to caress your head. In his brief time as your father, he took you on walks nearly every day, held you as you slept, even fed you at the dinner table though you were old enough to feed yourself.

But more than anything, I think you missed having him there when you were upset, to look upon you with eyes that forgave you all your tears, all your questions and sorrows. The moment he arrived in your life, despite being gone for most of it, he instantly filled a space that you had always reserved for him, for the promise of him, and he filled it with a devotion that he had already prepared in his heart before you were ever born. Perhaps that is the only way that true love can work, when it is prepared for and embraced without thought, without choice.

It struck me, while you were sick, that if I ever told you the truth, you would blame me and then hate me for not staying behind and letting him take my place.

Soon after you recovered, you disappeared again. While I was away at Mass one afternoon, you went out to the latrine and never came back. Our housemates offered to help find you, but I insisted on going alone. I was afraid my anger would betray me when I finally found you.

I searched all over the camp, every single place I’d ever caught you, including the waterfall where some man had recently fallen and broken his neck. I ended up at the beach, where I had to fight the impulse to grab every child who remotely resembled you.

I do not deserve this, I thought to myself, though it was still unclear what I did deserve.

A commotion soon interrupted my search. People began crowding the shore as yet another refugee boat came bobbing into the shallows, sunk by its occupants and slowly heeling as they jumped overboard and staggered, the healthy carrying the young and elderly, onto the beach.

I watched an exhausted man drag himself ashore with a frail old woman on his back and her arms locked so tightly around his neck that it seemed she was choking him and bringing him to his knees.

The prospect of you being lost forever washed over me then. It had never come to this, all those other times you disappeared. Perhaps my exasperation had numbed me to the panic, to the worry, because suddenly nothing mattered but that I never feel this way again. Never finding you was preferable to finding you dead or hurt. For the first time in my life, I could live with not knowing.

I thought of my encounter on the beach a few nights before, my vision, whatever it was. I had entirely forgotten it until that moment. It did not feel like a dream because I could hear again in my head her impatient voice, her bitterness.

Only then did I start walking toward the promontory. It had crossed my mind from the very beginning, but it still seemed incredible, you going there on your own. Perhaps the truth was that at that point I no longer wanted to find you at all. The closer I got, the less I knew what I would do if you were there. Was I to scold you yet again? Beat you until you stopped all this?

When I arrived and saw you sitting alone on the rocks below, I was struck calm. I can’t say now if it was relief or disappointment. You were there waiting for Son, for something I couldn’t give you myself, and part of me wanted him to find you and take you away for good. Where to? I kept thinking. Where to?

I started slowly and quietly down the path. You were sitting on your haunches and glancing around yourself, unable to stay still, dissatisfied with your own company. I saw then what I had always been unwilling to see. Your likeness to me, as stark as the waters below. That’s when I stopped, about halfway down the path. Every part of me felt exhausted, heavy with surrender.

You hadn’t noticed me yet. You crawled to the edge of the rock and leaned over to peer at your reflection. You gazed at it for a long time, unable to look away, leaning closer and closer to it, until suddenly your hand slipped. Before you could cry out you had tumbled headfirst into the water.

How can I explain what happened next? It was as though I had stopped breathing. My mouth was open, but nothing came out. My arms tried to reach out for you, but they felt petrified like my legs and every other muscle in my body.

Your arms were flailing in the water, your white face breaking the surface before going under once, twice. I might have been holding my breath the entire time because my heart was exploding in my chest and thudding in my ears as your yelps pierced the air.

I must have closed my eyes at some point because a loud splash forced them open. You had drifted farther from the rock, but he was already under you with his arm wrapped around your chest and your face lifted above water. He swam to the rocks, heaved you onto them before dragging himself out of the water.

My legs were finally moving by then, as if thunderstruck into action, and I stumbled down the path, only to freeze again a few meters from him as he was turning you onto your side while you gasped and coughed and cried all at once. I opened my mouth but did not know who to call out to. To you? To him? Was I now to pull you from his arms and hold you in mine, thank him as I wept over you, hoping he hadn’t seen what I had just done, what I had almost let happen? All I wanted was to close my eyes.

He looked up and saw me standing there, and his drenched face seized with recognition and then with a fury I’d only ever seen in a barking dog.

He left you there on the ground still crying and coughing and stormed up to me, and before I could step away he seized me by the arms and shook me and slapped me hard across the face. What is wrong with you, woman? he shouted and slapped me again. Open your goddamned eyes!

I took the blows blindly, feeling all at once the relief and the shame, the finality of what I had done, what I had failed to do. I felt his thick hands clutching my arms and my body weaken as I pressed my face against his chest and began to sob.

He let go of my arms. His chest stiffened. I expected him to push me away, and found myself sobbing harder when he did not. He must have thought me a madwoman, overcome by what I had nearly let happen to you. But I was not thinking of you at all. I was crying for myself, for everything I had lost, for your father, your ridiculous father, who would never hold me or forgive me anything ever again.