Dragonfish

6

“SHE’S MY WIFE,” I said to the girl. “My ex-wife. You don’t know anyone named Suzy?”

She shook her head uncertainly, holding the edge of the door, half hidden behind it. She seemed caught between seeing me as someone with vital information and someone who’d knocked on the wrong door. Behind her, a column of light from the window sliced the dresser in half.

“Are you alone?” I said.

“Why are you asking?”

“You’re right — I’m sorry. I’m looking for Hong Thi Pham. I call her Suzy. Do you know her?”

She waited a beat before nodding knowingly, like she’d been waiting for me to say the name. She pronounced it in proper Vietnamese for me, surname first. “I don’t actually know her. But I know who she is. She’s my mother.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I see it.”

We exchanged a moment of quiet recognition, aware that we had each just discovered something profound. I was still too stunned by who she was, too distracted by who she looked like, to know how exactly to act — trapped between a sentimental stirring inside me and dismay at her sudden existence in the world, which explained so many things about her mother at the same time as it explained nothing.

“Is this her room?”

“I don’t know. I guess so.” The girl glanced behind her as if to check that the room was still empty. “I was told to come here. Why are you looking for her?”

“She’s been missing from home since Sunday. Her car is gone, so we think she left on her own, but she didn’t tell anyone. Who told you to come here?”

“She did. She’s been sending me letters.” Her demeanor hardened suddenly like she was remembering herself, and she narrowed her eyes. “Look, I’m sure you are who you are, but I don’t know you any more than I know her. Shit, a month ago I didn’t even know she was alive. Now I’m here in an empty hotel room for God knows what reason.”

“Hey, it’s okay. Here, let me show you something. I’m just going for my wallet.”

I pulled out an old photo of me and Suzy at Fisherman’s Wharf, our backs to the ocean. We were a week away from getting married. Though I was beaming with my arm around her, her face was as solemn as the gray skies behind us. Smiling in pictures made her feel fake. We smile for who?

It came back to me then — how awkward and cold she’d get around children, how she’d always refuse when people offered their baby to her to hold, how adamant she’d been when I mentioned kids just a month before this photo was taken. She would have been about ten years older than the girl was now.

She held the photo close to her face and momentarily forgot me. That stirring inside me, I realized, was an outlandish urge to protect her. She had her mother’s beauty, except hers was distracted and uncertain: her chewed nails, her scuffed cowboy boots, the Rosemary’s Baby haircut framing her crinkled brow.

“You even stand the same way she does,” I said. “Here—” I handed her my driver’s license. “My name is Robert Ruen. Your mother and I were married for eight years. We lived in Oakland. It’s where I met her.”

“Guess she never told you about me. Why would she, right?”

“I’m sorry. I’m sure she had her reasons.”

“Don’t we all?” She gave me back my license. “Someone should apologize to you too.” She opened the door a little wider now. “You came all the way from Oakland to look for her?”

“She moved here a couple years ago. After our divorce. Her new husband here. . I’m helping him find her.”

I could see more questions popping into the girl’s head. She said, “Is she in trouble?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I’m here.”

“But how did you know to come to this room?”

“It’s a long story. You mind if I come inside?”

She glared at me like she was trying to peer into my soul, but there was also an eagerness in the way she pursed her lips and tapped her fingers on the door. She finally held it open for me.

The room was identical to mine. It was made up, pristine, no sign whatsoever that anyone had been here except for the girl’s purse on the dresser.

I asked her, “Were the curtains open or drawn when you came in?”

“Drawn. Had to let in some light. The rooms in these old casinos feel like tombs.”

I walked to the far wall without showing myself in the window and pulled the curtains close, plunging us into the room’s bronze light. I clicked on another lamp. She stood in the hall by the door, still holding my photo in her hand, thoroughly intrigued by all the stealth. I noticed a piece of paper by her purse, the one I had slid under the door. It must have mystified her until I came knocking and hollering. And even then.

“Listen,” I said, “I’m as confused by everything as you are. But before I tell you what I know, I need to ask you some questions. Is that okay?”

“You’re a cop, aren’t you?”

“I am?”

“You talk like one. No offense. I’ve run into a few cops in my life.”

“I guess you have. Don’t worry, you’ve done nothing wrong.”

“I know. That’s not what I’m worried about.” She approached me and gave back the photo. “You look happy there.”

I returned the photo carefully to my wallet, deflated by her composure. She didn’t want or need protecting, not yet. And even if she did, who was I to offer it?

She walked over to the dresser and retrieved her purse. She pulled out an envelope. “I got this yesterday in my mailbox. The letters always come in the mail, but they’re not stamped or addressed or anything. Just my name on the front.”

I opened the letter: Mai, Please go room 1215 at Coronado Hotel. 2:00 tomorrow. I leave something for you. Tell front desk your name and they give you the key. Your mother.

It was Suzy’s elfin handwriting. Her robotic English.

I didn’t hide my relief. “At least we know she’s alive and still in town. Yesterday, anyway. That’s all there was?”

“Yeah. Her other letters aren’t that much longer. More like notes really. I don’t have them with me.”

“You started getting them — a month ago, right?”

“A month exactly. This is the fourth one. The first one confused the hell out of me. No one I know would write me in Vietnamese. I had to get some random waitress at a noodle shop to translate it for me.”

“Sounded like you knew Vietnamese just a minute ago.”

“I can speak and understand it okay. But I might as well be reading Chinese. Anyway, in the first letter she says she’s my mother and has wanted to write me all these years, she’s never forgotten me, and she wants me to know she’s watching me now. That was it. Kinda freaked me out. First, I had to believe it was her. Then I had to imagine her out there watching me. Like, how the hell was she doing that?”

“Do you frequent the casinos? Do you work there, I mean?”

She had glanced at me as though I’d just accused her of something. She seemed both leery of my questions and anxious to answer them. “You can say that. I play poker for a living. Don’t look surprised, I make more at cards than I would at anything else.”

“I ask because Suzy was a dealer briefly when she first got here. At the Horseshoe, I think. She might have seen you there. Even dealt to you.”

“I’ve played there, and I’d remember her if she dealt poker. She must have done the table games.” She stopped and squinted at the floor. “Jesus, how many times did I pass her?”

“She’d never written you before? Even when you were younger?”

“She was dead, for all I knew. She left when I was five, a few months after we got to the States. Just disappeared one day without saying a word to anybody. Guess she has a habit of doing that. I have barely any memory of her. She left two weeks before Christmas. Right about now, come to think of it.”

I was ready to say something consoling, but a flash of bitterness in her eyes told me she didn’t want the sympathy.

“Do you know your father?” I said and found myself wincing inside at the thought of whoever he was, someone long before me, someone secret and original.

She shook her head casually. “He died in Vietnam not long after my mother and I escaped. Cancer or something. I can’t remember a thing about him. All I know is that he fought with the Americans and was sent to the reeducation camps after the war and got real sick there. My uncle—his uncle, actually — told me all this. He’s the one who raised me in LA after my mother left, he and my grandaunt.”

“They’ve never heard from her?”

“Wouldn’t have told me if they had. They were hard-core Catholics — unforgiving as hell. She was dead to them, and when I dropped out of college and took up gambling, they cut me off too. Probably started seeing a bit too much of her in me. They weren’t way off, because after my granduncle died a few years back, I left for Vegas and haven’t spoken to anyone in the family since.”

She was sitting on the edge of the bed and talking mostly to the dresser. I could sense that she had wanted to tell someone these things for a long time.

“So there were two other letters.”

“Yeah. In English, actually. It was weird — her English wasn’t that good, but that made it easier for me to read, you know? Less intimate maybe. Less of her real voice. I wasn’t ready to hear that yet. In the second letter, she says she called up my cousin in LA two years ago and pretended to be an old friend of mine, and my cousin — that twit — tells her I’m a drug addict and a gambler in Vegas, which is only half true. So anyway she moved here and tracked me down. She says she doesn’t like it here, but it reminds her of Vietnam for some reason, and she starts going on about the mountains and the skies in Vietnam. Bad poetry, honestly. She says she hopes I quit the drugs and the gambling and visit the homeland some day. It’ll help me. Who told her I needed helping? I kept thinking of her living here all this time, driving past my apartment, then putting shit in my mailbox — when I’m at home, even. She came here to look for me and she found me, and for two years she didn’t do anything. So why now?”

Her voice had gotten small, and she was picking at a thread on the bedcover. She became a child all of a sudden, as though she’d been spending the last ten minutes suppressing any part of herself that might seem young or feminine or weak. She was a clarified version of her mother, with all the carefulness but none of the mystery, and that somehow eased my mind amid the shock of all she was telling me.

The moment passed and she stood from the bed, stuffing her hands into the pockets of her jeans. “By the way — what did you mean, ‘at least she’s alive’? Were you afraid she was dead?”

“Not exactly. I just want to find her as soon as possible and make sure she’s okay.”

She was studying me again with that hard burrowing stare. “She divorced you, didn’t she?” I must have shown some annoyance because she said, “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I said that.”

I swallowed and waved away the apology. “It’s all right. Your mother did leave me. And yes, I’ve never stopped caring for her.” She nodded sheepishly, so I pressed on, “Tell me about that third letter.”

“That was the oddest one. It came last Saturday. She says she’s going somewhere, and that before she leaves she has to give me something. She also says that one of these days everything will be explained to me. Still not sure what she means by ‘everything.’ I don’t know if it’s me or her English or if she’s just trying to be the most mysterious person on earth.”

“She had a habit of that too. Don’t take it personally.”

The girl almost smiled, which startled me, made me aware of how intimate our conversation had become.

I said, “Did she give you any indication in her letters that she wanted to meet?”

Her face fell, again that childish demeanor, that instant smallness, eyes averted and lips pursed. “No. I figured she might be here, waiting for me. I was all ready with things to say.”

I looked around the room. “So what did she leave you?”

She shrugged. “Didn’t have much time to look before you started knocking on the door.”

I walked into the bathroom and started searching the cabinets, the tub, the hamper. Mai was picking through the nightstand drawer when I came back out. “The dresser has nothing either.”

“Have you checked the closet?”

She shook her head.

The brown carry-on suitcase stood beside the ironing board in the closet, with a notecard taped to it. Mai, written in red marker. I carried it to the bed. It weighed a good thirtysomething pounds and looked brand-new.

“I’ll do it if you want,” I said, but she was already trying to unzip it. Then we both saw the small silver lock.

She grabbed her purse and rummaged through it until she finally fished out a tiny chrome key. “This was also in the envelope.” She shrugged apologetically. “I didn’t know yet if I should tell you.”

She inserted the key into the lock, and it opened. She hesitated a second before unzipping the carry-on and flipping it open.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” she whispered.

It was packed with jumbled bricks of cash. She picked up one and flipped through the twenty-dollar bills. I did too. Fifty bills a brick. It took me a while to count all the bricks. About a hundred in all.

“Goddamn,” I said. “There’s got to be a hundred grand here.”

“They’re real,” she muttered, inspecting a bill under the lamplight and feeling it between her fingers. She plopped herself on the bed beside the carry-on. “She left this all for me?”

“I don’t think it’s hers to leave.” I gently took the brick from her hand. She gave me a defensive look. I replaced the money and zipped up the suitcase and went through the outer pockets and sleeves. Nothing but a few silica gel packets.

I turned to her. “Mai, listen to me carefully. Do you know a man named Sonny Nguyen?”

She shook her head.

“Are you sure? He plays a lot of poker in town. Short, bald, about fifty. Mean-looking.”

“Half the Vietnamese guys that play are balding and trying to look mean. One at every table.”

“How about a Jonathan Nguyen?”

“Am I supposed to know these guys?”

“Well, Sonny is your mother’s new husband. Jonathan is his son. This is their money.”

“You know this for sure? Why can’t it be hers?”

“A hundred grand? Your mother had nothing when she left me, and she stopped working when she married Sonny. I doubt he’s this generous. She took this money from him. No wonder they’re desperate to find her.” I banged my fist on the suitcase. “Goddamn it, how can she be this stupid! She didn’t think they’d come after you too?”

Mai gave me a moment before saying, “Maybe I should be scared, but I’m more confused than anything. Who are these guys?”

I turned away from her so she couldn’t see my face and that exasperated flush that only Suzy could inflict on me.

“I guess you can call them businessmen,” I said. “High-class smugglers, actually, gamblers in every way. The father’s got an ugly temper and has had more than a few run-ins with the law, so the son seems to run everything — a restaurant, a pet store, black-market shit, who knows what else. Anyway, it’s not about who they are. It’s about what they’re willing to do to get what they want. And now I know what they want.”

“But you said you were helping them.”

“I didn’t have a choice. Listen, I don’t have time now to explain. You need to leave this hotel. They can’t know you were here or who you are or that you even exist.”

She glanced again at the carry-on. “And what are you gonna do — stay here?” She gave me a stiff look, unsure of the accusation she was making but making it anyway.

“Hey, I don’t want any part of this. Trust me. If I had a choice, I’d be on the 15 back to Oakland.”

Her face tightened. I was using my severe-cop voice, but she wasn’t having any of it. We had a hundred grand in cash staring at us, and I was still as much a stranger to her as her own mother. That’s when it hit me, with relief but sudden melancholy, that Suzy had already come today and would not be coming again — that I no longer had a reason to be here.

I softened my tone. “How about this — I go with you. You barely know me, I know, but I need your help getting out of town, and you need my help too. We can’t be too careful about this. And the sooner we both go, the better.”

“Wait — you want me to leave town? Like, just up and go right now? And you’re just gonna explain this all later?”

Her voice was more shrill than it needed to be, like she was trying to convince herself not to take me seriously. I could see her mother’s stubbornness in her. All that loneliness that comes with refusing anything sensible the world gives you. And there it was again, my protective urge, heroic and sincere and ridiculous all at once. I wanted to shake her.

My father came to mind again. The same man who used to seize my mother by the neck in an argument, slap her hard sometimes if things got nasty — he once cuffed me on the back of the head for not holding the door for a woman at the store. “Be a man, would you?” he said.

I pulled out the surveillance photo of me and placed it on the bed in front of Mai.

“This is what they got on me. That’s Sonny on the floor. I put him there. Doesn’t look good, I know, but. . last year he threw your mother down the stairs, broke her arm, nearly killed her. I came to Vegas five months ago to teach him a lesson. Turned out to be a pretty dumb idea. I put a gun to him here because he went at me with a kitchen knife. Asshole tried to plunge it into my fucking heart. You’ll just have to trust me on that one.” I pulled up my sleeve to show her the scar on my wrist. “The son did this and also broke all my fingers to warn me away from his father. I didn’t listen. Now they’re blackmailing me with this surveillance footage so that I’ll find your mother for them — though it’s apparently the money they really want. They might know nothing about you, but they might know everything, and until I can figure out what is what, you and I need to go some where where they can’t find us. And believe me — they’ll find us in Vegas.”

Her eyes darted back and forth between me and the photo, blinking back the questions. A gambler’s knee-jerk skepticism. Or maybe she was finally scared.

“You don’t have to believe that I’m an upstanding guy,” I said. “But at least you know I’m not crazy. I wouldn’t make us both walk away from a hundred thousand dollars if these guys weren’t dangerous.”

“So we’re just leaving it all here?”

“Have you been listening?” I grabbed her purse off the dresser and handed it to her. “Now please tell me you fucking drove here.”

“Okay, okay. Yeah, my car’s in the parking garage. Casino level.”

I put the lock back on the suitcase and carried it to the closet. I remembered the five hundred dollars Junior had given me and stuffed it in an outer pocket, then grabbed the notecard with Mai’s name before closing the closet. I made a point of giving her back the tiny chrome key and also offered her the notecard. She gave the closet one last glance as she followed me out of the room.

Once we arrived next door, I started throwing all my stuff into the duffel bag. She looked around as though she’d been led into some labyrinth. She tried the knob of the adjoining door like a child poking a mannequin for signs of life. I went to get my Glock from the nightstand and she watched me stick it in the back of my jeans. I think it hit her then, the gravity of the situation.

“Ready?” I opened the door.

She didn’t move. Again, that stare. “You never told me how you knew to come here.”

I sighed and let the door slowly close. “Your mother,” I said. “She’s been coming to that room every Thursday night for a few months now. They had her followed but never found out what she was doing here. I can’t even begin to guess. She liked being alone. Always has. So maybe that’s all it was — a room to be alone in. Anyway, they were hoping she’d show up today since it was booked again in her name. She did, apparently.”

I had missed Suzy in the last few hours. In fact, she might have passed me and made herself invisible somehow, as was her way. She might have even read my note, left it there on the floor.

“She’s still in town then,” Mai pointed out.

“Maybe. But she’s made as big a mess as I have. I can’t clean up both at the same time. Not with you in the mix.” She was about to say something else, but again I opened the door. “We need to go. You can tell me once we’re on the road.”

At the elevators, I took a moment. “Describe your car for me. In detail.”

“An old black Jeep, a CJ-7. Big fat tires, ragtop. Real dirty. The passenger door is scraped pretty bad.”

“Okay. You shouldn’t be seen with me, in case Sonny has eyes here. Once we get down there, start walking to the garage. I’ll follow you from a ways back. Just go to your car and then drive up to the casino entrance in the garage, and I’ll wait for you there.” I tapped the elevator button.

She was looking askance at me.

I dug out my badge for her. “Here.” I placed it in her hand. “In case you’re still wondering.”

She weighed it in her palm as though weighing its authenticity, and mine. It occurred to me that I was supposed to be the good guy in all this whether I was wearing that badge or not.

The elevator dinged open. The cell phone in my pocket rang.

7

“WHO IS IT?” Mai whispered.

UNKNOWN CALLER appeared on the phone’s display.

“It’s the son.” I nudged her into the elevator. An old couple stepped aside and nodded at us with polite smiles, and the doors closed. I silenced the phone on the fourth ring.

“I’ll call him once we’re out of here,” I said under my breath. She was peering at the breast pocket of my jacket, where the phone was.

The old woman leaned over and tapped my arm, the gold bracelets on her wrist rattling. “Pardon me, sweetie — have you-all tried the buffet?” she asked, her southern accent as frail as her hands.

“Not yet, ma’am,” I said.

The old woman glanced at Mai and smiled, still talking to me. “I hear they got Chinese food too. And Japanese and Mexican and Italian. Little bit of everything.” She chuckled sweetly.

I tried to look impressed.

Her husband ignored her and so did Mai, who had taken out a pen and was scribbling something on a business card. When the elevator opened, she handed me the card and murmured, “The number to my cell — just in case,” and we walked out separately. I stood to the side and lit a cigarette as I watched her thread her way through the swarm of afternoon gamblers. It was a card for some place called the Midnight Room. Her number was written on the back.

Everyone had a cell phone in this town, even people who had no one to call. Always on the move, these people. Always ready for the next destination.

The old woman tapped me again on the arm, smiling and squinting through her owlish spectacles. “What a pretty oriental wife you got.”

Her husband, who was dressed in a bolo tie and a pea-green suit that looked as old as I was, pulled her by the hand. “Thelma, let’s go.” As they walked away with her holding his arm, I could hear him mutter to her, “That’s not his wife, dear.”

The cell phone was ringing again and I ignored it and started across the casino floor. Mai’s figure turned the corner and vanished. She moved like someone accustomed to walking away from people at the slightest provocation. She didn’t know how to trust people, or maybe she just didn’t on principle. My father once told me he was glad I was a boy because girls were either too trusting or too suspicious, and he had no patience for either thing, especially if he was to teach someone how to survive the world.

A waitress, all legs and bust, was approaching me with an empty tray, mistaking my stare for thirst or desire or whatever it was that men usually eyed her for. What I really wanted was to toss the cell on her tray and make a clean run for the city limits, cut my losses and abandon everything to this desert dust, consequences be damned. Knowing I couldn’t and wouldn’t do that pissed me off all the more.

Suzy had always been rash like this, blindfolded half the time — a hungry infant one day, a sullen child the next. And now she’d left her daughter a poisoned gift and somehow contaminated me as well. For two years I had mislaid that anger she was so good at stoking, and locating it again made me at once nostalgic and bitter, as helpless as I’d always been, and now with more questions than ever. Maybe getting Mai out of town was me protecting myself from all that old impotence.

I weaved through crowds of people whooping and high-fiving each other around the table games, then passed solitary men roaming the floor as though adrift on their cigarette smoke, deaf to the singing slot machines. A casino, I’d always thought, was a carousel of hope and hopelessness. I’d been to a few in California. They were all the same. You come for your drinks, your music and dancing, and of course your spin with fate, and then you win or lose, and then you either leave or go right back and seek shelter at another game, another chance at fortune. But when you’re there, you can’t hide. Not for long. Not with so much hope everywhere.

Maybe that’s what drew people like Sonny and Mai to this place. Its endlessness. The thought quickened me toward the exit.

In the lobby, a gaggle of young women in tight skirts and high heels were snapping photos in front of the giant glittering Christmas tree. One of them accosted me with her camera and begged me to take their picture. In the viewfinder, they raised their drinks and blew me bright lipsticked kisses. I walked away annoyed by my desire for them.

Outside the casino entrance, I waited several minutes before Mai’s Jeep finally lumbered up, tires as high as my waist. She was dwarfed by it, a schoolgirl behind the steering wheel. The Jeep was dusty and pockmarked and had a rusted foot-long gash on the passenger door, which creaked open.

“I need your room key,” I said, tossing my duffel bag inside.

“Why?” She was gripping the steering wheel with both hands.

“The money is all they want, and we’re giving it back to them. We’ll need to leave them the key somewhere here.”

She looked confused but fished the keycard out of her purse. I walked to a row of potted ferns by the wall and slipped the keycard into one of the large stone pots, pushing it into the dirt. Mai watched me carefully from the Jeep.

As soon as I got back inside, my cell started ringing, and again I silenced it.

“You’re not answering?”

“Not until we’re miles from this place. He’ll call again. Head for I-15 going south. Once we’re on the highway, I’ll answer and tell him how to get the money, and we’ll see what he says from a safe distance.”

We exited the parking garage and the desert sun hit us like a camera flash. I peered through the rear window, checking all the cars behind us. The facade of the Coronado went white in the sunlight, quickly receding as Mai barreled down the streets.

I was escaping a burning house again, I thought — but was I also abandoning someone inside?

Mai played with the heater, but it didn’t seem to be working. She spoke up, “There’s something I haven’t told you.” She stared hard at the road, shifting gears like she was restraining an angry animal. “On Tuesday a woman came to my door. Vietnamese woman. Woke me in the middle of the afternoon with her loud knocking. I’d never seen her before in my life. She had glasses on and was wearing a casino uniform and a baseball cap low over her eyes, and she asked me, real serious, if I was Mai. I noticed a cut on her lip and a bruise under her eye that she tried to cover up with makeup. When I said yes, she asked if my mother had contacted me. I was too stunned to say anything, but I guess she could see the answer on my face. She told me that if I saw my mother, if I had any way of reaching her, I had to tell her to leave town at once. Tell her Happy said this, she told me. Tell her Happy means it.”

Mai was gauging my reaction. “I didn’t get that it was her name at first. Had to repeat what she said over and over to myself. You know this woman, don’t you?”

I nodded tiredly. “Your mother’s friend. Her best friend, actually. We knew her in Oakland, but she lives here now. I have no idea where.”

“That’s why I didn’t totally trust you at first. I thought you might be the reason my mother needed to leave town.”

“Did Happy tell you anything else?”

With her free hand, Mai began rummaging blindly through her purse and finally pulled out a prescription bottle. “She gave me this. She said my mother needs it. And then she hurried away before I could say anything.”

The bottle was Suzy’s prescription of anxiety pills. Something she’d been taking in the final few years of our marriage.

Mai’s face was soft in the sunlight, fine-boned. Her short hair accentuated the size of her eyes, which — when they gazed at you — seemed to want everything and at the same time give you nothing.

“I’ll be honest with you, man,” she said, “I don’t give a shit about anyone in the world. But this is my mother, you know. I’ve stayed up every night for a month thinking about where she could be, why she’s writing me. Everywhere I go now, I’m looking for her, and I don’t even know what she looks like. It makes me sad, but it also pisses me off. It’s like she’s always just around the corner and at the same time on the other side of the world. Actually, that’s how it’s felt for twenty years.”

We kicked onto the highway, the Jeep rumbling now as she shifted into high gear. She was waiting for me to say something, but I wasn’t ready yet to say it. Her patience embarrassed me, made me understand that I was a grown man, a cop no less, asking a young girl I barely knew to help me escape the city, to save me from my worst self.

The phone started ringing again. I looked at Mai and put my fingers to my lips.

I took a breath and answered after the third ring. “Yes?”

“I’ve been trying to reach you, Officer Ruen.”

“Who is this?”

“Me and my brother brought you here this morning.”

I twisted around in my seat and scanned the cars behind us. Mai was giving me curious looks. All I could do was gesture for her to keep driving.

“I’m not following you,” the voice continued. “Mr. Nguyen doesn’t know I’m calling. No one knows, not even my brother.”

It was the older brother. His voice sounded distant. It reminded me of his sad eyes in the rearview mirror the previous night.

He said, “We should talk.”

“Why?”

“I know the girl is driving you in a black Jeep. I know she’s Mrs. Nguyen’s daughter.”

He let that sink in for a second. “There’s a bar called the Cottage on Paradise Road, just north of Flamingo and a few blocks from the Stratosphere Hotel. Small white building with a chimney, right next to a strip club. Meet me there now, both of you, and I’ll explain everything.”

“Explain just what exactly?” I struggled for a way to tell him he was crazy if he thought I’d actually go meet him face-to-face, let alone bring Mai with me.

But then he said, “You left the money, didn’t you?” When I didn’t reply, he added, “The money in the room. In the suitcase.”

“If Sonny wants it, it’s all there. We want no part of it.”

“Okay, you’re fine then. For now. As long as he doesn’t know where it is.”

“So it is Sonny’s money.”

“Every last dollar.”

“And all you want is to talk.”

“You’ll both want to hear what I have to say.”

“You’re trying to help us?”

“I’m trying to help Mrs. Nguyen. Look, I helped her steal the money. Now meet me at the bar as soon as possible. Remember, the girl comes in too.”

He hung up. I palmed the phone and let my hand fall to my lap.

“Well?” Mai said impatiently.

I peered at Suzy’s prescription bottle in my other hand with a mixture of relief and old dread. “All right,” I said. “We’re not leaving yet.”

8

AS MAI DROVE US up Paradise Road, with the Stratosphere Hotel looming in the distance, a giant alien scepter, I told her about her mother’s most recent episode with Sonny. Twenty minutes was barely enough time to state the facts, let alone explain the truth of the matter, which after ten years still felt as far away from me as ever.

“She used to be like that with me,” I said. “Scared me shitless. I didn’t know what to do half the time.”

“Jesus,” she muttered with a disbelieving chuckle and a shake of her head. “Woke up this morning thinking I’d meet my long-lost mother. Now I find out she’s a thief and she’s crazy.”

“Don’t say that,” I told her. “Your mother’s not crazy.”

What she was, I could not say. The doctor — her physician actually, the only doctor she ever saw — called it acute depression. I would always think of it as a sadness she carried around like something she needed.

Mai slowed down as we passed Flamingo Road. We started looking for the bar. It was frigid in the Jeep, but the sunlight warmed my cheek, made me think of warmer days in the past when I’d go driving with Suzy by the ocean. I was never the passenger with her. I drove us everywhere, even when we took her car. It was my role and I insisted on it, and to some degree she did too, though I know now that I drove because I simply didn’t trust her to do it.

Had we the time, I would’ve told Mai about my honeymoon with her mother. I would’ve told her about how we had gone to San Diego, a drive that took us an entire day, and how her mother got carsick and vomited several times onto the Pacific Coast Highway.

It was July, traffic was horrendous, and the car’s air conditioning was weak and intermittently didn’t work at all, not to mention I had forgotten the cooler with all the drinks and snacks she prepared. She spent most of the ride with her seat reclined, staring out the window at the ocean as the tape deck played her yowling Vietnamese ballads.

San Diego was my idea. We could go to the zoo, eat authentic Mexican food, visit the beaches and see Tijuana in the distance. She agreed but seemed less than thrilled. I suspected a honeymoon in our living room would have suited her just fine. She had this irrational fear of leaving town and being unable to come home, of us somehow getting lost and never finding our way back. That’s what she told me, anyway.

Even before I was old enough to understand my parents’ arguments, my father used to tell me — usually after one of my mother’s fits throwing dishes or books or whatever — that women lose control when they’re afraid and that men lose control when they’re in love. Naturally I took all this on faith until I finally fell in love myself and realized, with some horror, that it was often no different than being afraid, and that my father had been simply confessing how little he loved my mother and how much it terrified her to know that.

When we finally got to San Diego that evening, I decided to take Suzy to an expensive and secluded seafood restaurant on the shore, a place I once took a girlfriend years ago. She was quiet throughout dinner. She still looked a little white but was also, I knew, silently blaming me for everything that had gone wrong that day. I ordered all her favorite seafood — oysters, squid, lobster. I must have spent half a week’s salary. She ate some bread and pasta but barely touched anything else, so I let her sulk and stuffed myself, nearly finishing everything on my own.

When the bill came, she got onto me for spending so much. I told her to calm the hell down, which was when she snapped and demanded that I drive us back home. I suggested she walk home if she wanted to because I wasn’t driving another goddamn mile, and that’s when she flung her fork onto her plate, shot up, and stormed out of the restaurant, abandoning me to a restaurant full of curious glances. I hadn’t yet paid the bill and had to toss my card on the table as I hurried after her.

I’d had women do this to me before and was already rolling my eyes when I saw her marching alongside the dark windy road that led away from the restaurant. The key was to let them cool off, to avoid forcing anything. So I followed, calmly calling after her, insisting that we should drive to the hotel and get some rest, that she’d feel much better after a night’s sleep. She continued down the side of the road in silence until we had walked nearly half a mile.

Finally I decided to catch up, and I grabbed her arm and she turned and looked through me, as though at something frightening behind me.

“I want to go home,” she muttered in a distracted voice and wrenched her arm away. “I need to go home,” she kept repeating to herself as headlights from a passing car illuminated her dress and her petite figure and yanked her shadow across the two-lane road. Even in that moment, I desired her.

We had known each other for only four months then. I was humoring her not yet out of understanding, not yet out of exasperation, or resentment, or a lack of options. My love was still too new for me to see this as anything more than a problem I could always fix later, a nuisance that came with the territory.

So I continued following her, hoping she’d just tire herself out. We could have easily been mistaken for a couple on an evening stroll along the shore, with her leading the way as the ocean waves mesmerized us and kept us silent. And in fact, they did. I was bone-tired from the drive and busting at the seams after eating so much, but the moonlit evening was breezy and the rumbling waves were lulling me into a calm that I found more pleasant than anything we’d experienced that day.

The road turned lonelier, just the ocean on our right and hills on our left, and very little light save the moon and a single dim streetlamp every quarter mile. Suzy veered away from the road, climbed casually over the guardrail. She approached the edge of a grassy cliff that overlooked the dark beach below us.

I came up beside her. “What are you looking at?”

She said nothing for a few moments. Then she took another step forward and pointed, almost sadly.

I squinted and finally made out a solitary figure strolling alongside the water’s edge. I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman.

“Do you want to go down there?” I asked. “I’m sure we can find a path.”

“Yes,” she murmured but did not move. A moment later, in a wounded voice, she said, “I don’t want to bother them. Maybe they want to be alone.” She had a habit of referring to an individual in the plural, almost like it was rude to refer to anyone as only one person.

“The beach is big enough for all three of us. I’m sure they won’t mind.”

The figure began wading out into the water, dipping hands into the ocean.

“Come on, let’s go,” I said. “I’ll find the path for us.” I tried to take her hand, but it was balled into a fist. “Why are you crying? Come on, it’ll be nice down there. The water will do us good. And the sand—”

But she was shaking her head, her shoulders trembling a little now. She started backing away.

“What is it now?” I tried to check the annoyance in my voice. “Come on, it’ll be fun.”

“No,” she replied and climbed back over the guardrail as I moved toward her.

“Well, then we should get back to the restaurant. I left my card there, you know.”

I was raising my voice again, a thing I would always have a problem controlling with her. But she was moving faster and farther away from me and still murmuring “No” to herself and shaking her head and crying in her muffled way.

“Where the hell are you going?” I shouted after her, before screaming out a moment later when I saw the lights of an approaching car. She was still rushing toward the road, and then her feet hit pavement and she sprang back just as the car’s headlights set her ablaze, and in an instant the car swerved, screeching its tires, and crashed headfirst into the guardrail on the other side of the road.

Suzy stood there like she was lost. As I raced past her, she turned to me in horror, clarity returning to her eyes, and I knew she had come back to earth. I would confront that face many times again with both relief and anger, but at that moment I was much more concerned with whoever was in the car.

It looked like an older man, his body slumped over the deployed airbag, face turned inward under a mop of strewn white hair. He had not been wearing his seat belt. His car’s front end was embedded in the gnarled guardrail, headlights doused, but I saw no smoke or sign of leakage.

“Sir?” I called through the half-open window. “Can you hear me, sir? Are you okay? If you can hear me, don’t move. Do not move any part of your body! We’ll go get help!”

I ran to the passenger side, reached in, and took the key from the ignition. It was still too dark to see his face or any blood. I felt his neck and found a pulse. My hope was that the impact of the airbag had only knocked him out.

I remembered Suzy and looked up and she was standing on the other side of the car, peering in with frantic eyes. She said, “I killed them.”

“No, you didn’t. But I have to call for help. We passed a gas station down the road.” I rushed over to her. “Baby, I need you to stay here and watch him. Do not move him, understand? If he comes to, tell him he has to stay completely still. If the car starts smoking or anything, run away as fast as you can. Do you understand all that? Do you? I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

She was startled out of her trance and started shaking her head at me. “No, no, don’t leave me,” she pleaded quietly.

“Someone has to watch him in case he comes to. I’m coming back, all right?”

She took hold of my wrist and kept insisting I not leave, and finally I had to wrest my arm away. “Stay, goddamn it!” I thrust my finger at the motionless man. “I need you to stay! I will be right back!”

Her arms fell and she looked at once chastened and desperate. Before she could say anything else, I raced down the road.

When I got to the gas station, it was still open but no cars were out front and I couldn’t see the attendant at his counter. Instead of running inside to find him, I ran directly to the pay phone.

I gave the dispatcher the location of the accident, but when she asked for more details, I pretended to have been a passerby in my car. Maybe I already sensed then what Suzy would do. Maybe I was already acting out of shame. When the dispatcher asked me for a number and a name, I hung up and started racing back.

The driver’s body still had a pulse but had not yet moved. Suzy, on the other hand, was gone.

I started calling out her name, screaming it at one point despite knowing it would make her less likely to respond. She was probably as terrified of me now as she was of the accident she had caused. I’d never seen her look at me that way. She might still, I thought, be in the throes of whatever emotion had seized her and thrown her out onto the road. I knew I had to abandon the driver.

Up the road, the grassy cliff beyond the guardrail dipped and a rocky path revealed itself. I scrambled down the slope, out of breath at that point, until I landed on sand and began running across the beach and again yelling for her.

I soon heard sirens swarming in the distance, no doubt a fire engine, an ambulance, and the accompanying squad cars, all in case the accident was severe. They would probably block off the entire road. Unless we wanted to be questioned, we’d have to find another way back to the restaurant.

By the time I made it down the length of the beach, my shoes were filled with sand and grating my feet and I could see the glow of flashing emergency lights from above. I was hidden under a canopy of trees crowding the hillside, tramping through the sand in darkness. The beach was desolate. All I felt, more than worry or exhaustion, was this helpless rage at what Suzy had done to me that day. In our first months together, she’d shown glimmers of how emotional she could get, slamming doors and cabinets and crying even at our silliest arguments, but she had not yet revealed this side of herself.

I considered returning to the accident to explain everything and report Suzy’s disappearance, so perhaps then they could help me find her. But I’d also lied to the dispatcher, making the call anonymously, leaving the scene, and I wouldn’t be able to explain all that away, not as an officer of the law myself. Knowing this just made the rage worse.

My only option was to walk back in the direction of the restaurant and hope to find her on the way, and if not, I could go searching for her in my car.

It took me nearly half an hour to find my way up onto the road, far enough away from the accident to not be noticed, and then back to the restaurant. Only a few cars were left in the parking lot, my Chrysler one of them.

I saw a lone figure in the backseat. She was sitting still in the darkness, hugging her legs to her chest. She jumped when I opened the door.

“What the hell were you thinking!” I hissed at her.

She was peering up at me stark-eyed and shaking her head again like she was shivering. “Don’t let them arrest me! Don’t let them take me!”

“I told you to stay there, goddamn it. Why did you take off like that?”

“I killed them. I killed them!”

“You didn’t kill anyone,” I snapped at her.

She was tearing up again and trembling, pushing herself farther into the car.

I took a long breath and went down on a knee. I softened my voice. “No one’s going to arrest you. It was an accident, and you didn’t do anything wrong. I’m sure that man will be fine. He was just knocked out, is all. Come here.”

I got into the backseat with her and closed the door. “Come on,” I whispered and put my arm around her. “Everything’s okay.”

Her hot face pressed against my chest, and she curled into that space that had already become hers, like she was wrapping herself into the folds of a coat. I felt then the dampness of her dress and hair, the bits of sand on her arms, strewn also over the car seat.

“You are sure?” she said, hugging me tightly now.

“Yeah, he’s fine.” At that point, I was convincing myself of that too. I could call the nearest hospital the next day and confirm it. “The police and the medics are there and they’ll take care of him. Let’s go to the hotel now and get some sleep, okay?”

“And the woman?”

“What do you mean?”

“The woman. In the back. She is okay?”

“The woman. . ” I repeated to myself. In the darkness, I could feel her staring into me, her breath warm against my chest.

“She look like she sleeping. But then she open her eyes and she look at me.”

The hair on my arms bristled, and the darkness felt stifling. Again I heard sirens wailing from afar, like she and I were in a cocoon and the world outside was burning.

Had she hallucinated some phantom woman in the car, or was I the one who’d gone crazy and somehow overlooked another human being in the backseat? But why would the woman sit in back and the man in front? Did I even once glance back there?

I said, “I’m sure she’ll be fine too. I promise you they’re both fine.”

After we finally got to the hotel that night and showered together and then lay our wet heads down on our pillows, Suzy fell instantly asleep and I lay there blinking at the ceiling, promising myself that I would call the hospitals in the morning.

When I awoke at dawn, she rolled over and embraced me and apologized for everything that had happened. We made love in the gray light.

Afterward she wanted to describe the dream she had had that night. I braced for something terrible, for her to start crying as she recounted it. It turned out to be the one beautiful dream of hers that I know: of her living in a three-story house drifting on the ocean. You could reach outside the many windows and caress the waves that lapped the walls day and night. Her entire family from Vietnam lived there with her, even those who had died. Everyone had their own room, her mother and father, her aunts, her uncles, her sisters and cousins, and every room was colorful and unique and connected to the others so that you could walk through them all like you were walking through a garden of rooms. Only years later, thinking back on this dream, did I wonder if I had a room in this house, or if I was even there at all.

In the afternoon we went to the beach and swam in the ocean and ate a lunch of grilled fish and oysters. I took her shopping afterward and bought her a new dress, then we saw a matinee showing of Dances with Wolves, which moved us both to tears, and in the evening we had a delicious dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant downtown. We made love twice more that night, and she cried the final time.

Perhaps I made myself forget, but I never picked up the phone that day.

9

THE COTTAGE, which had white wooden shutters and a white chimney, stood facing the road, flanked by a strip mall of restaurants and a strip club called Paradise Palace. The tiny parking lot out front was empty, but I told Mai to park in back. We walked under a red awning and through a red door and stepped into a room cloaked in rusty light.

All the tables stood afternoon empty, snugged up against button-tufted leather booths that looked proudly worn. Wood paneling and crimson wallpaper surrounded us, above us a low canopy of ceiling fans spinning lazily. The place had a saloonish quality, a cowboy gruffness despite all the dolls encased in glass cabinets along the walls. They stood side by side, dozens in each cabinet, some a foot tall, decked in period dresses and garish hats and hairstyles: a showgirl, a cowgirl, a geisha, an English wench, a French lady. Mai stepped up close to one cabinet and glanced at me to see if I shared her bemusement.

A young couple were arguing quietly at the bar, their faces close, their lips moving swiftly. The girl was luxuriously blond and wore a green dress, and it took me a second to realize that the guy, who had on jeans and a T-shirt, was a girl too, her slender left arm covered in colorful tattoos as she gesticulated at the blond, their voices muted by Lee Hazlewood crooning “Some Velvet Morning” over the jukebox.

At the other end of the bar sat an old bearded guy sucking on a cigar beneath his Stetson, too engrossed in his video poker to care about the girls or us. He was the one who looked out of place.

Behind us, the front door opened and two men in suits and open-collared shirts walked in, both taking off their sunglasses to look around. They must’ve mistaken the bar for the strip club and promptly turned and walked back out. I couldn’t imagine Sonny setting foot in a place like this either, which explained why we were there.

“We should probably order something to drink,” I told Mai.

The bartender, a sturdy middle-aged woman, stood watching the TV on the wall, her short inky hair gleaming beneath the white Christmas lights strung above the bar. When she turned to greet us, her casual smile felt like the first genuine thing I’d seen in Vegas.

“Getting cold out there, huh?” she said, her voice cigarette raspy. “I should put on a sweater, but my tits like to breathe.” She grinned innocently at Mai. Her blouse was low-cut, her leathery bosom less sexual than a proud badge of all her years in the harsh desert sun. “What you having, baby?”

“A Coke,” Mai replied and turned to me.

“Whatever you got on tap,” I told the bartender. I asked Mai, “Too early in the day?”

“I don’t drink. Or do drugs. My cousin’s an idiot. Can’t do that stuff if you want to be good at cards.”

I went for my wallet, but she had already set a hundred on the bar.

“You play every day?”

“When I’m not sleeping.”

“Why poker?”

“The money,” she replied dryly.

“Bartender at the Coronado told me poker players are an honest lot. Very proud.”

“He just means we’re control freaks. It’s great to be lucky, but it’s better to be in control. When you’re good, you can control the luck.”

She tipped the bartender the price of both our drinks, and then she turned and noticed what I had not.

Nested in the far corner of the bar was a small stage with a black piano, above it an unlit neon sign: DON’T TELL MAMA. A few tables stood against the wall by the stage. The older brother was sitting at one with a pitcher of beer, staring at us patiently through his cigarette smoke.

“Don’t tell him your name,” I muttered to Mai.

We got our drinks and made our way to the table. He couldn’t take his eyes off her, but then I remembered that he must have known what her mother looked like.

As we sat down, he nodded at me and said “Hello, sister” to Mai in Vietnamese. On the wall above him was a cabinet of dolls dressed like old Hollywood starlets, their lipstick smiles made vulgar by the shadows.

There were three glasses on the table, though only his was filled. He intended for us to talk a bit. Beneath the table, I noticed, leaning against his leg, was a small black backpack.

“My name is Victor.” He pushed his cigarette pack toward me, the same one from this morning. Again he offered me a light. His name and a cigarette: gestures of goodwill. In the car this morning, he must have wondered what it took to earn the trust of a man like me.

“Has he called you yet?” he said.

“Your boss? Not if you’re the one who called me the last four times.”

“He probably won’t, then, unless I report something. And I haven’t.”

His voice had a cold, quiet edge to it that these young tough types cultivate nowadays, though I could see that it was shyness too that hardened his face. It was easy for him to intimidate. Much harder for him to look people in the eye and talk to them earnestly.

Mai was peering at him as I imagined she would another poker player. She had yet to touch her Coke.

I gestured at her. “They know about her?”

“I would’ve already visited her if they did.”

“Like you visited Happy?”

He went silent, then blinked a few times at Mai. “She came to see you, didn’t she?” To me he said, “Mr. Jonathan — the son you spoke to — he was there. I had to do my job. Don’t worry, she gave up nothing. That’s why we had to go visit you in Oakland.”

Mai said something in Vietnamese to him. His face crimsoned.

“What was that?” I said.

“I asked him if he liked hitting women.”

“Of course not,” Victor replied. He recovered his calm and added, “Not even when they deserve it.”

I jumped in, “So what are we doing now, Victor? You and your brother broke into my home yesterday and put a gun to my head and then drove me here to do something I don’t want to do. And now you say you want to help me.”

“I said I want to help Mrs. Nguyen.”

A glass shattered somewhere, and we all looked up. The bartender, her hands on her hips, was peering irritably at the floor behind the bar. Patsy Cline was playing now, and I noticed that the two girlfriends had stepped away to slow-dance by the jukebox, the blond with her head on the other girl’s shoulder, their argument doused. They had caught Victor’s attention too. I couldn’t tell if he was bothered or intrigued, but when Mai swiveled in her chair for her own glimpse, I saw him give her a lingering look.

He coughed hoarsely into a fist and drank his beer. “It’s Mrs. Nguyen I want to help,” he repeated.

“Then tell us everything you know. Start at the beginning. How much time do we have?”

He flipped open his cell for a quick check and then set it back on the table. “It’s a bit messy.”

“Only a bit?”

He put out his cigarette. He’d only smoked half of it. “First thing you got to understand is I rarely know their reasons for doing anything. I do what I’m told, I don’t ask questions. Me and my brothers, we’ve been doing that for years now. We started out washing dishes, and now we do whatever needs doing. They like that we can take care of ourselves, that we send money home to our mother, that my brothers do what I tell them. Knowing your place and what you have to do — they expect that of everyone, especially people they trust. They put us through school, you know. That’s the other thing you got to understand. Me and my brothers came to America on our own. Our father died on the way, and we haven’t seen our family back home in thirteen years. So Mr. Nguyen and his son, they’re all the family we got here.

“But like I said, certain things they don’t talk about. When Mr. Nguyen got married two years ago, we didn’t know he was with anybody. We were curious, of course. But we never saw her. She didn’t come by the restaurant, and when I drove Mr. Nguyen home or picked him up, I had to park by the curb, stay in the car. So I only ever saw her from a distance, standing in their living room window usually. I think he wanted it that way, her not knowing about his business, us not knowing about her. But some things you can’t help knowing. He started arguing with her a lot on the phone, spending more and more time at the restaurant, at the casinos. I lost count how many times he’d storm out of the house when I picked him up in the morning, all red-faced and cursing to himself. Drunk. He’s always been a drinker, but I’d never seen him start that early in the day until Mrs. Nguyen came along.”

Victor kept his hands in his lap like they were handcuffed under the table. I noticed he didn’t gesture when he spoke, even when there was emotion in his voice. And it was strange to hear so many words come out of his mouth. He wasn’t that taciturn after all. He just had remarkable self-control.

“Then one night last year,” he said, “I get a call from Mr. Jonathan, telling me I have to come to the house at once. I figure I’m in trouble or something. But when I get there, he’s waiting at the front door and waves me inside. First time ever. He looks nervous, which isn’t like him. When I walk into the living room, I see why. His father’s sitting slouched by the staircase in his underwear and no shirt on, and he’s holding his hand like it’s broken. He looks at me with bloodshot eyes, like he doesn’t know me. Mrs. Nguyen’s lying beside him at the foot of the stairs. She’s not moving. Her hair’s a mess. Her nightgown’s ripped at the shoulder. I can’t see any blood, but at the top of the stairs is an overturned lamp. Mr. Jonathan’s on the phone with 911, and when he hangs up, he hands me a pair of pajamas and orders me to put them on. He says Mrs. Nguyen has fallen and is unconscious, so when the paramedics come, I have to tell them I’m a family friend who was staying over and woke up and found her this way, that she accidentally fell down the stairs. I’m not to say anything else, or move her, or let her move on her own if she wakes up. He’s gonna meet me at the hospital shortly. I get even more freaked out now because I know he’s trusting me with her life. He grabs his father’s good arm and gets him to his feet, like he’s a stubborn child, and he starts hurrying him to the garage door. Mr. Nguyen hasn’t said a word yet, but suddenly he pulls his arm away and smacks his son across the face with his good hand. Mr. Jonathan glares at him like he’s ready to choke him. But then he just says, ‘Let’s go, Dad,’ and his father looks back one more time at Mrs. Nguyen and stumbles out the door on his own.

“So they leave, and I do exactly as I’m told. An hour later Mr. Jonathan arrives at the hospital. He’s alone, acts real concerned with the doctor and the nurses, even holds back a tear when they tell us that Mrs. Nguyen broke her left arm and suffered a concussion. She was lucky she didn’t break her neck. After that I’m told to go home.

“A week later, I finally see Mr. Nguyen again. He’s got a metal splint on two of his fingers. Him and his son act like nothing happened, but for the next few months, he’s a lot calmer and nicer on the phone with Mrs. Nguyen. He’s drinking less, brings food and flowers home to her. They even go to Hawaii for a week, and I know how much he hates flying.

“But once she gets better, things go right back to how they were. I pick him up one morning and he’s got a big bandage above his left eye. Few days after that — this was about a month ago — she comes storming into the restaurant during dinnertime and demands to see him. Mr. Jonathan tries to calm her down, but she swipes a glass from the counter and smashes it on the ground. That’s when Mr. Nguyen comes rushing out of the kitchen, grabs her by the arm, hauls her into the kitchen. There’s a lot of yelling at first, stuff flying around, but then his office door slams shuts and we don’t hear anything for hours. Even after the restaurant closes, they still don’t come out.

“So I wasn’t all that surprised when Mr. Jonathan took me aside the next day and told me to start following her. It was now my full-time job. Rent a different car every day, park down the street, wait for her to leave the house. Anywhere she goes, I go. She didn’t work anymore, so I was usually following her to the grocery store or the shopping mall, sometimes to the movies. One thing she liked doing was going to the casinos in the afternoon and just walking around, gambling a little, watching people. Sometimes she’d go driving for an hour and then come straight home. I reported all that.”

Victor had been telling his story mostly to me, but now he turned thoughtfully to Mai. “What I didn’t report was her visiting you. One afternoon she parks across the street from your complex, crosses over on foot. She walks directly to your apartment, drops an envelope in your mailbox, and doesn’t stop until she gets back to her car. I guess you got that letter.”

Mai gave me a knowing glance but offered Victor only coolness. “You just kept that to yourself? Respecting her privacy all of a sudden?”

I expected someone like Victor to bristle at sarcasm, but again he seemed surprised, more hurt than annoyed by her tone. “I was respecting the situation,” he insisted. “I figured I was following her because Mr. Nguyen thought she was cheating on him or something. This felt like something else though. The way she looked after she went to your apartment. . When she got back to her car, she sat there for a long time with her hands gripping the steering wheel and just stared at your complex. It was like someone had died. I went back to your apartment that evening and waited on that bench by the pool. You passed me, actually, when you came home. You were wearing exactly what you’re wearing now. I knew at once who you had to be. It’d be obvious to anyone who’s seen your mother. And I don’t know — something about the whole thing. . it felt so private, I guess. I admit I was curious, but I didn’t want to say anything until I knew more.”

He tried to look Mai in the eye, searching for some approval, and I could see now why he was doing all this. The first time he saw her, she must have inflamed his curiosity just as her mother did to me ten years before. He probably went back to that bench the following night and every night after that. Might have even fantasized about this very conversation, in this bar, with her and only her sitting across from him.

“I watched her mostly during the day,” he went on. “Mr. Nguyen was home in the evening, and she rarely went out after sundown anyway. The one night I had to keep watch was Thursday night, which has always been Mr. Nguyen’s long session of poker. He plays at the casino from seven in the evening to seven in the morning, so she spends that night alone, and recently she started going to the movies. That didn’t surprise me. I had already followed her one afternoon to a showing of Castaway. Sat four rows behind her and saw her cry several times, even during parts of the movie that weren’t sad at all.”

His face softened. He spoke to Mai with sudden confidence, an intimacy he seemed sure she would reciprocate: “You and her left Vietnam by boat and were at sea for a long time. Awful things happened, I’m sure.” He said a few words in Vietnamese, as if reciting some adage she surely knew too. Then his voice leaned into her. “Mr. Nguyen and his son were also on that boat. All four of you went to the same refugee camp.”

Mai appeared to withdraw from him in her seat. In a small voice, like she was claiming innocence, she said, “My uncle said my mom and I were on Pulau Bidong.” She pronounced the name with Vietnamese inflection.

He nodded. “That’s where she first met him,” he added delicately. “You must have met him too. We were there, actually, me and my brothers. Seven years later, long after you guys left. I think that’s how he first felt he could trust us. Knowing we’d been to the same place, and that our father died there.”

I’d become the stranger at the table. Victor fell silent, and Mai was speechless, cupping her Coke with both hands. I wanted her to know what Junior had told me about him and his father in that camp, how Suzy had loved Sonny long before she met me. I wanted to tell her that as bad as it is to have no memory of something significant you were a part of, it’s much worse to know you were never part of it at all.

“Anyway. .” Victor turned back to me. “I was actually looking forward to going to the movies, but when Thursday came around, she drove to Fremont Street instead. To the Coronado. It was suspicious for sure, her going to the one place in town where Mr. Nguyen and Mr. Jonathan are blacklisted. Anyway, she checked herself into a room with nothing but her purse, and that’s when I got real nervous for her. I had the front desk put me through to the room, but she answered, so I hung up. If someone was in there with her, I knew I had to report it, and there was no telling what Mr. Nguyen would do about that. Then five hours passed and nothing happened. At midnight she came out, checked out of the hotel, and drove home. I tried calling the room again right after she left, but the front desk said it was vacated. So that’s what I told Mr. Jonathan — that Mrs. Nguyen had been alone in there the entire time.”

Victor refilled his glass with the pitcher. He drank like he was thirsty. It seemed to embarrass him, telling us all this, hearing his own voice so much. I wondered if this wasn’t some kind of confession for him, one he was ashamed yet eager to give — more to Mai apparently than to me.

“Do me a favor, Victor,” I said. “Don’t call her that.”

“Mrs. Nguyen? You want me to call her Hong?”

“Whatever. Just don’t call her that.”

He shrugged his assent, and he and Mai exchanged a brief private look like they both understood my pain.

His cell phone chimed and startled all three of us. He picked it up, his eyes gathering Mai and me carefully before he answered it. His voice was low, his Vietnamese soft and slurred, a southern accent. He appeared to be answering questions.

When he hung up a minute later, he said, as if issuing us a warning, “That was Mr. Jonathan. He’ll check on me every two hours.”

“You said something to him about a gun,” Mai said.

“I told him a few weeks ago that I saw your mother buy one at a pawnshop. I was just reminding him there.”

“So she’s packing heat too? Jesus, is this woman seriously my mother?”

“But she hates guns,” I said to them both. “Never even touched one. She bought a gun?”

“Not exactly,” Victor replied. “But she does have one.”

“So you lied to him?”

“About her buying the gun, yeah. She’d actually taken one of his.”

“Then why mention it at all?”

“Because she wanted me to.”

In the silence that followed, he put a fresh cigarette between his lips, then changed his mind for some reason and inserted it back into the pack before returning to his story.

AFTER THAT FIRST TRIP to the Coronado, he spent most of the following week sitting in his car, watching their house from his curbside seat. The only time Suzy left home was for groceries, the mail, or takeout at the nearby Chinese place. Through his binoculars, he could see how unkempt her hair and clothes were and how stark her face looked, like she was perpetually waking from a nap. I knew that face from all her long melancholy spells, going to bed as soon as she got home from work, sleeping until two in the afternoon on her off days, sometimes spending the entire day in bed watching television. Victor said she moved like an old woman.

When Thursday evening arrived, however, she came out of the house in a dress with her hair brushed and her face made. She was carrying a red knapsack. As she had the previous week, she drove to the Coronado and checked herself again into room 1215.

Victor tried to stay out of sight, but just in case she spotted him, he had also started wearing baseball caps and sunglasses, which must have got to him. I could see it now on his face. It wears on you — watching someone who doesn’t know you’re there, who doesn’t know they should be hiding from you. After a while, you start feeling like the one hiding from them.

But did Suzy know he was there that entire time? Sitting in his anonymous rental by her curb, the same guy who picked up her husband every morning in a funereal Lexus, that dark figure behind the steering wheel and the tinted windows? Had he made some sort of impression on her from that distance, even before this mess started? Her world was hardly big enough for the people in her life, let alone those on the periphery. So how did Victor get in?

To look more like a hotel guest that night, he wore a suit. He sat in a chair across from the elevators, just around the corner from her room. Anytime he heard someone approach, he lifted the magazine he was reading. He must have wondered how long he could keep this up before she started noticing him there every time she left her room, or before some hotel staffer or security camera noticed too. Maybe it was that night that he realized how tiring it was to hide. Maybe that’s why he was careless.

Nothing happened for a couple of hours. Hardly a soul passed him in the hallway except for the hotel maids rolling their cleaning carts.

At some point, he dozed off. He didn’t know for how long, but when he opened his eyes, Suzy was sitting on the edge of the chair next to his and eyeing him like she’d been waiting for him to awake.

She spoke to him in Vietnamese, a proper northern accent, which often makes southerners feel inferior. She told me that once when I laughed at her English. I’m not a dummy, she chided me. In Vietnam I speak beautifully.

Tell me, little brother, she said to Victor. What is your name?

He told her his Vietnamese name. Perhaps he was still in shock, because it never occurred to him to lie or deny anything.

You’ve been following me. For my husband.

When he nodded, it felt like a confession.

He believes I’m crazy, she said. His son does too. You’ve been watching me for some time now. Please tell me the truth. Do I seem like a crazy person to you?

She had asked the question so sincerely that he knew she’d see through a lie. So he said, A little.

Why? What makes you think that?

Because you always seem like you’re looking for something that isn’t there.

She sat back in her chair.

It’s good that Son chose you, she finally said, her eyes calmer now. Instead of your brother. You seem like someone who thinks long and hard before you do anything. I think that’s why you have a sullen face. And why you smoke all the time. You should stop that, by the way. You’re so young and yet I see you coughing all the time.

Suzy waited for a hotel maid to reach the end of the hallway before she spoke again, her voice lowered:

I decided tonight. Just now in my room. I want to ask for your help. You can say yes or no, of course, but from here on it’s all in your hands. There’s nothing I can do about it after tonight.

Victor knew she was about to tell him things she couldn’t take back, but he must have been burning to know what else she meant by that. Suzy had a habit of putting things in that way, as though she had accidentally set your house on fire and had no choice now but to stand back and watch it burn.

She said, You followed me to that apartment I visited last week. That’s my daughter who lives there. I haven’t seen her since she was five. I’ve been writing her letters. She has no memory of me, I’m sure. It’s quite possible she hates me, or doesn’t think of me at all. Twenty years ago, I left her with her granduncle and went as far away as I could. I’m still not sure I can explain why — to you or to myself. I don’t regret it though, as difficult as it was to do. The strange thing is that I’ve never stopped thinking of myself as a mother. You must think that’s ridiculous. How can a woman give up her child and still see herself as a mother? But that’s why I’m here now, talking to you. You’re the first person I’ve ever told this to.

Victor remembered her taking a breath after she said that.

“WAIT A MINUTE,” I stopped him. I had to check the disbelief in my voice. “Why you?”

Victor shrugged slightly. “That afternoon at Mai’s apartment. She recognized me. She saw me in her rearview mirror, smoking out of my car window, and immediately realized what was going on. It really worried her, of course — Mr. Nguyen finding out about Mai. But when she got home, he didn’t act any different with her. If he knew something, she would’ve seen it. He’s not very good at hiding his feelings. So that really shocked her — that I hadn’t reported anything. Somehow she just knew it and decided to trust me.

“There’s another reason. She told me this at the hotel. The night I waited for the ambulance with her — she opened her eyes at one point and started moaning, murmuring to herself. I figured she was too out of it to see or think clearly, but she remembered me kneeling beside her and telling her not to move, that help was coming. She said I held her hand until the ambulance arrived. I guess I did do that.”

Mai spoke up. “So she told you about me, but did she ever tell Sonny? If he met me back on the island, he must have asked her about me. Hey, where’s that daughter of yours? What she doing nowadays? The subject must have come up at least once in two years of marriage.”

Victor didn’t reply immediately. He glanced at me like I already knew the answer. “She told him you had died in a car accident when you were six. She didn’t want him knowing anything about you. To protect you.”

This brought on an exasperated chuckle from Mai as she sat back in her chair. In the dim light, she resembled the dolls on the wall behind Victor. Her smile was as baffled as theirs, and it both stiffened her face and made it seem brittle.

“Why did she start writing me, then? Did she tell you that?”

“Well, she asked me to follow her to her room, and that’s the first thing I saw, the letters on the desk. She said she’d been coming to the room for months to write you. Long letters, apparently — that she hadn’t sent yet. It was the only place she could do it. I figured she wanted me to deliver them to you or something. But then she reached into her knapsack and pulled out a gun and set it on the bed in front of me. She said the hotel was the only place in town she felt safe. And she needed to feel safe, if only for one evening a week. Then she told me that she was leaving Mr. Nguyen, that I knew what he had done to her that night and that he had done other things too and would never ever let her go. She’d have to leave town without him knowing. She could manage that, but she had to do something else before she left. Something for you. For that, she needed my help.”

“The money,” Mai said.

“She knew about Mr. Nguyen’s safe at the restaurant, inside his office. Where he keeps cash from business dealings and all his gambling. I’ve seen him put tens of thousands of dollars in there at a time. She had figured out the combination, and all she needed from me was the code to the alarm and copies of the keys to the restaurant and the office. She offered me twenty thousand. The rest she was leaving for you.”

Mai sat there stiffly. “One hundred thousand dollars,” she murmured, as if to herself, and no longer with that gleam of shock and desire she showed at the hotel. She was appraising, it seemed, the price of her forgiveness.

I could have told her that money had always been about freedom for her mother, that she had made me return her engagement ring so she could put the money in the bank instead — but I felt out of place at the moment sharing something like that, or saying anything at all.

Victor was massaging his brow, adjusting himself in his chair. He’d been recounting everything with a self-assured, strangely nostalgic calm, but Mai’s mention of the one hundred grand had plummeted him back to earth, where the implications of what he’d done must have hit him hard again.

“She had a plan, if that’s what you want to call it.” He sounded impatient. “In a week, once I got her the keys and the alarm code, she was gonna go get all the money in the safe, leave it in a suitcase in that hotel room for you, then leave town. She kept insisting it was all very simple. All I had to do was pretend I didn’t know anything. Just keep following her like normal, like I still didn’t exist to her, and when everything went down, just do whatever Mr. Nguyen and his son ordered.” Victor’s voice tightened, like he was straining to understand his own story. “I told her, though. They already knew about the hotel room. Was it really the safest place? All she said was that it had to be that room. And that she trusted me.”

He put up a hand like one of us had tried to interrupt him. “I know what you’re thinking. Why me, right? How was she so sure I’d go along with all this? That I would trust her and go betray a man I’d been obeying for — how many years now? He’d cut my throat if he had to.”

He was shaking his head feebly now.

“Do you need the money?” Mai said.

“Who doesn’t need the money? The money had nothing to do with it. It still doesn’t.”

Fleetwood Mac’s “As Long As You Follow” had started playing on the jukebox, the opening guitar chords tingeing Victor’s last words with a melodramatic air.

The bartender was leaning over the bar and chatting quietly with the cowboy, like old friends, like co-conspirators. They were the only other people in the place now. The two young women had left some time ago, and their absence somehow reminded me that I was in the desert, in a bar among strangers.

“Why did you do it then?” Mai finally asked Victor. She had dropped her interrogating tone.

I couldn’t quite manage her sincerity yet. When he didn’t reply immediately, I said, “You know he’s a bad man. You always knew that.”

Both of them turned to me like they’d forgotten I was there.

“What is a bad man to you, Officer?” Victor said.

I saw then why he was good at his job. He could slip on that coldness like it was a second face.

I’d forgotten about the small black backpack by his feet. He unzipped it and pulled out a videotape, which he set gently on the table.

“I haven’t told you the whole story.”

10

VICTOR, I COULD SEE NOW, was a reluctant criminal. He enjoyed his job as much as I enjoyed Vegas but kept at it for that most Asian of reasons: obligation. To his brothers probably, who looked up to him. To his family back home, who relied on the money he sent them. And of course to Sonny, who had taken him in and made him a man, programmed to honor duty over desire. I could see it in his eyes every time he looked at Mai. The kid had never truly desired anyone, and this strange new thing he felt made him both defiant and naive. The most annoying kind of criminal.

He nudged the videotape closer to us, like it was some sinister artifact, and I could imagine it all from there: years of him thoughtlessly obeying orders, doing whatever needed doing and looking the other way, and suddenly one morning from his car he sees his boss’s wife, who he’s never met before, standing in the window of their home. She’s watching her husband, his boss, walk to the car that will whisk him away to all the ugly things he does during the day, without her, and she knows this. Her arms are crossed, her stare cold and yet strangely tender, like she is saddened by something she also hates. She frightens him actually, though he feels this inexplicable urge to protect her. She reminds him of his mother or his sisters back home, and maybe also those desolate women he saw in the refugee camp. Every morning he comes to pick up his boss, she’s standing in that window like some troubled ghost haunting the house.

Then one morning, though he’s far away behind sunglasses and tinted windows, she sees him. He can feel her judging him. Her arm is in a cast and she knows now that he has hurt people, stolen from them, perhaps even killed them — all for his boss who’s done terrible things too, including all the things he has done to her.

So when he is ordered without any explanation to follow her, he does so with redemption on his mind. It’s the naive hero in him, the good son. Every day he trails her down the aisles of grocery stores, through the afternoon crowds at shopping malls and casinos, and into half-empty movie theaters, until one afternoon she leaves a letter at someone’s apartment, and when he returns that night and sees who this someone is, he finally understands. All that wandering through the city has been a circling around this young woman, her long-lost daughter, who’s even more beautiful and perhaps more alone.

And so maybe he falls in love with this younger version of her. Or maybe the whole thing makes him think of his dead father and the mother he might never see again. Or maybe it just makes him angry, that people have to carry around secrets like this.

When she appears at his side in the empty hallway of the Coronado hotel, it feels like they’ve been silently speaking to each other all this time. She starts telling him the story he’s been waiting for. In room 1215, she reveals the letters on her desk, the gun in her knapsack, and the fear in her heart. One day soon, she says, intentionally or not, his boss will kill her. She has to leave him, but she wants to punish him too, this man who’s probably given Victor everything he has. When she asks for his help, he refuses, so she reaches again into her knapsack and pulls out the videotape, puts it into the VCR. She goes into the bathroom with her rosary and asks him to knock on the door when he is done. He must watch it all, she says. To the very end. And then she’ll tell him everything else.

THINGS HAD STARTED GOING BAD a year back, when Sonny’s poker game went sour. He’d come home from his sessions moody and drunk, starting arguments and slamming doors for no reason. She had no idea how much he was losing, but the thing he always blamed was his luck. It baffled him, enraged him. He kept telling her about it, repeating the same bad-beat stories in different ways, like he was trying to convince her of how outrageous it all was. She tried to sympathize but had to steel herself against anger that felt directed more and more at her, like he believed on some level that her presence in his life had somehow affected the way the universe was treating him.

She admitted to Victor that she’d blamed herself too for a time, that her own dark moods often scared her more than Sonny’s did and had come to pollute both their lives. A year in the desert had dried up whatever hope and happiness the move there initially promised. She felt walled in by all the mountains, oppressed by the barrenness of the land, the emptiness of the sky, and all that constant sunlight. She told me once that she preferred the nighttime to the daytime because at night most things are hidden, and it made her feel safe. Back then, that made no sense to me.

She went back on her old medication, but it no longer helped her sleep as it once had, so she turned to sleeping pills, even during the day. Mixing that with alcohol made things worse, and she was doing that daily now, just as she had with me. Two or three beers at lunch. A bottle of wine every evening.

Her bad dreams returned. They crawled around inside her all day. She started seeing the people from her dreams. They would walk past the bedroom door or the bedroom window, trail her on her walks through the neighborhood in the middle of the night, vanish behind trees and fences and into shadows. She dreaded the nighttime now — a choice between not sleeping at all or taking pills that would unleash all the terrors inside her.

But Sonny didn’t care. He had no interest in her nightmares or her visions. He slept soundly, I imagine, through all her trembling in the night, her nonsensical murmuring, her waking up with a start and grabbing your arm, your hand, ready to tell you all the horrible things she’d just dreamed. She had no one to tell them to now. Maybe that’s why she got to hating him so.

She started arguments over things she barely cared about, like which lights should stay on or how hot the tea should be. She couldn’t stop herself. As soon as she began antagonizing him, it was like some pulse inside her would quicken and overtake her with an intensity she no longer felt for anything else. I remember it well. That dark eruption of fire in her eyes. A rage I’ve since suspected felt good on some level. She used to lock herself in the bathroom after our arguments and weep quietly for as long as an hour, and I wonder now if — more than shame or sadness — it was out of relief that she was still alive inside.

I doubt Sonny had patience for talking things through, for seeing doctors or finding solutions. They simply stopped doing whatever it was that had made them happy that first year of their marriage, if they were ever happy. They even stopped making love, an urge that had apparently dried up in her. With me, she used to blame her medication or her drinking or her period. Who knew what reasons she gave Sonny, but I doubt if any would have made a difference.

The night of the fall, she awoke to him kissing her hard on the mouth. He’d come home late from the casinos, his breath reeking of alcohol. She pushed him off her, and that’s when she saw the kitchen knife in his hand. He stood up, completely naked. He demanded she take off her clothes. When she refused, he plunged the knife into their mattress. When she tried to run from the room, he seized a handful of her hair and dragged her back to the bed. In their struggle, she grabbed the baseball bat he kept by the door and whacked the knife from his hand. He screamed out in pain, cursing her as she fled the room. At the top of the stairs, he caught her again by the hair, but she turned and kicked him in the groin, which was when he grabbed her face and shoved it like he was taking off her head. She remembered stumbling back and gripping the top of the bannister, then losing her grip and nearly all memory of what happened thereafter.

She awoke on a hospital bed with Junior sitting beside her. He looked even more severe than usual. He insisted his father was devastated, had not known what he was doing, would never do anything like it again. Junior would see to it. He’d make him quit drinking. He’d move back into the house with them both if necessary. She just had to try to forgive him and say nothing to the police. He swore to protect her from then on.

Who knows whether she actually believed him, but in that hospital bed she must have already been planning her escape from them both. She told Victor that the first time Sonny saw her at the hospital with her arm in a cast, he knelt and wept in her lap. For months, he stopped raising his voice around her, came home early to eat dinner and watch TV with her, and went to bed with her every night. He treated her again with that quiet kindness he showed no one else, not even his own son. But she knew it wasn’t going to last. She was just biding her time until her arm healed.

And then, out of the blue, I charged into Vegas with my death wish and must have wrecked all her plans. Was she lying to Sonny when she promised to stay with him if he spared me? Or was she trying to contain the damage, the rage I had reawakened? No wonder she never reached out to me. No wonder she put all her trust in a confused Vietnamese kid, a reluctant thug.

What finally broke her, of all things, was perfume. She’d never worn it in her life, and one day she smelled it on his clothes in the closet. It could have been knee-jerk jealousy, residual love even, or simply one betrayal too many — but this rage, her own, she could not contain. She drove at once to the restaurant to confront him, and only when he vehemently denied everything was she sure that it was true. He was a liar, but he’d never been able to lie to her.

She went mad. She threw things in the kitchen and screamed and cried until finally he seized her car keys and forced her into his office and onto the couch, and then he held out her pills in his hand. When she refused, he shoved them into her mouth.

He must have treated those pills like I used to, like they were magic. Take them and voilà! you become your old self again, or someone else entirely, someone new and preferable — though the truth is that that broken person inside you still lives and breathes and merely hibernates until reawakened.

Hours later, she opened her eyes and found herself alone in the office, lying on the couch in darkness. She’d never been in that office before. The door was locked. It was one in the morning and everyone in the restaurant must have gone home hours before. There was no telling when anyone would come for her. For the first time in a year, however, she felt safe.

All his drawers were locked, so she started sifting through the papers on his desk, opening random books on the shelf and peering under the couch. She told Victor that she was not searching for anything in particular, just seizing an opportunity to rummage through his things and maybe see him in a way he did not want to be seen.

That’s how she stumbled upon the safe, concealed behind a painting of storks. It didn’t surprise her at all since he liked hiding things the way they do in movies, and also because he had installed a similar safe at home, a smaller one hidden in their bedroom closet where she kept all that jewelry he bought her that she never wore.

She tried the same combination on this safe — the date of his release from the concentration camps. It didn’t work. She tried other dates: his son’s birthday, the day he left Vietnam, the day he first arrived in America. She knew about his obsession with dates. It was a gambler’s superstition — a way to hold on to the past, I guess, so you can control the present and the future.

She tried everything she could think of, forward and backward, with no success, and it was finally in giving up that she punched in one last-ditch combination, which turned out to be the right one. Her own birth date.

The safe was a mess. Hundreds of cash bricks stacked every which way, tossed inside like the ziplock bags full of colorful pills and the five or six handguns piled on top of each other.

She counted as much of the cash as she could without moving anything, and that’s when she noticed the videotapes at the very back of the safe. Six of them, labeled only with dates from the past six months. She knew about his closet of surveillance tapes at home, so it immediately intrigued her that he was keeping these six here. At random, she chose one and put it in the VCR.

IT BEGINS WITH HER standing in their kitchen at home and washing dishes. The date onscreen is from two months ago. It’s morning or maybe the afternoon. The only sound is running water. You can’t see her face or understand at first why he would keep video of her doing something ordinary like this. Then you fast-forward two minutes, then five minutes, and slowly you see it. For a good quarter of an hour, she washes the same glass over and over without rinsing. She stops only to pump more soap onto her sponge.

The video cuts abruptly to her standing at the living room window, still in the same clothes, arms crossed and staring not so much out of the window as at it, like she is praying to her reflection. Again she stands there for twenty minutes without once turning away. As the video fast-forwards, her body hardly moves.

Then it is evening, still the same day, and she’s sitting empty-handed at an empty kitchen table, then brushing her hair on their bed, then watching the snowy TV screen in their bedroom, all for extraordinarily long periods of time.

What must she have thought when she saw herself this way? Perhaps it’s the grainy footage, the distance and the bad lighting, but in each new scene she looks more and more unrecognizable — her body too long, her skin too dark, her face too angular. It’s like Sonny videotaped an impostor in their home, a famished twin of her pantomiming these mindless acts. If she did indeed see those people from her dreams, then maybe this is what they looked like, this creature, this unfamiliar shade of her.

The next footage is dated a week later. There’s only darkness until suddenly a light flicks on and it’s from the bathroom in their bedroom. You can see Sonny lying facedown in bed, with only his pajama pants on, sound asleep. Then you hear the toilet flush and you see her appear in the doorway of the bathroom in her white nightgown, the same one she always wore with me. She used to wake up three or four times at night to go to the bathroom, sometimes locking herself in there for God knew how long. But now she is just standing in the column of light that spills onto their bed and onto Sonny’s broad naked back. She’s staring at him, her profile barely visible. Maybe he looks kind when he’s asleep and she’s rediscovering a tenderness for him. Maybe she’s imagining him suffocating under a pillow. Whatever is on her mind, she seems entranced by it, and it probably doesn’t go away after she clicks off the light.

The tape cuts to another day, another afternoon of her rearranging the same twenty or thirty books on the bookshelf for over an hour, more of her standing by the window and brushing her hair and wandering naked around the house, like she’s looking for her clothes.

Then it’s nighttime again, and this time it’s Sonny standing by their bed and her lying asleep. The small lamp on their nightstand is the only light, but you can see that he’s naked as he stares at her, and you can see very clearly the kitchen knife again in his hand. It seems at first that this might be the night of the fall, but the date is months later. And after a minute, though only his backside is visible, you realize that Sonny is touching himself. You can barely hear him groaning under his breath as he holds the knife, pointed at the ground, in his other hand. Finally his body trembles, and then he is still. She has not yet moved on the bed. He continues staring at her for a long time, swaying ever so slightly. Then he trudges into the bathroom, knife still in hand.

You wonder now why he would include this footage of himself — why stitch together all this video of her bizarre behavior, alongside his own, and keep it locked up in a safe? It’s like a secret affirmation of their connection to each other. An act of communion with someone he has already lost.

The video stutters, and you skip to the next scene, which is again at night and looks at first like a replay of the previous scene. Sonny is naked again, his back to the camera, the knife again in one hand as he’s touching himself with the other. But it’s another night. She’s lying on the bed beside the long pillow she always hugged in her sleep, her slender arms visible atop the blanket though her face is obscured in the shadows.

A moment later he sets the knife on the nightstand and draws back the blanket. Slowly he lifts her nightgown, drags her underwear down her legs. He crawls on top of her. His movements are careful, unhurried, soundless. His broad back conceals her face entirely, but you can see that her body has not yet moved, not on its own.

THIS WAS THE MOMENT, she told Victor, that stopped her heart. She wanted to turn off the video, throw the remote at the TV. But she couldn’t look away. She forced herself to keep watching, to confront it all no matter what new horror came into view, until suddenly it did: she saw those thin arms beneath him move and snake themselves around his back, the hands clawing now at his head, his neck, his spine. The legs were moving under him too, wrapping themselves around his backside. She heard a voice groan in the video, a distant sound, and realized it was her own voice, though it sounded deep and throaty and alien.

When at last he finished and moved off into the bathroom, the body fell still as though it had never awakened, the face a shadowy blur. He returned with a towel to clean the body, but it might as well have been a corpse on the bed.

Only then did she flip off the TV and rush to the light switch. She retched into the wastebasket. The office door remained locked no matter how much she wrenched the knob. The room must have felt a mile underground.

They had not touched each other in over half a year. The last time he kissed her, she insisted to Victor, was the night he threw her down the stairs, months ago. The last time he saw her naked was when her arm was in a cast and she couldn’t bathe herself. She was convinced of all this, that she could not have tolerated being intimate with him that entire time — except for the possibility that she had somehow forgotten, or been drugged, or been out of her mind. Was that truly her on the video? What else had he done and what else had she forgotten? What else was on those other five tapes?

She didn’t have the stomach to see anymore. What made her most ill was her last reaction, when those thin arms awakened and started touching him all over and she found herself more horrified than if the body had not moved at all.

It was now two in the morning. He must have locked the office and expected her to sleep through the night — that deep and impenetrable sleep of hers that was more an affliction than a rest from anything.

She ejected the tape. She put it back inside the safe, but then changed her mind and pulled it back out, along with one of the handguns. She buried both at the bottom of her handbag.

She turned off the lights and lay back down on the couch after swallowing two more sleeping pills. The darkness swam around her, she said, for hours.

It was Junior who woke her in the morning with a bowl of ramen, a cup of coffee, and another apology for his father.

VICTOR WAS LOOKING from Mai to me, gauging our thoughts.

“Anyway,” he concluded. “That’s what finally did it for her. She said she had to leave after that — no matter what.”

He fell silent, averting his eyes like he’d run out of things to say.

Mai drank from her watered-down Coke. His story had disturbed her, and she was trying not to show it. She wiped her mouth with her fingers. “So you believe her, then. That Sonny’s capable of killing her.”

“Mr. Nguyen is capable of anything. But your mother was afraid of herself too.” He nodded at the videotape in front of us. “Especially after she saw that. She told me to keep it in case something bad happened to her. As proof, I guess. I’m giving it to you now.”

Mai shook her head slightly. She nudged the tape toward me. “You’ve told me enough.”

I fingered the tape, inspected it, and knew I would have to watch it, that I both wanted to and was afraid to. I imagined Suzy sitting alone in that dark locked office, petrified in the white glow of the TV screen. What horrified her most about seeing herself in the video — what she had forgotten, what she didn’t know, or what she recognized?

“Proof of what?” I said. “This tape doesn’t prove anything — except that she’s sick and that your boss is a perverted fuck. What use is that to anyone? Victor. . why have you been telling us all this?”

The question startled him. He seemed sheepish for a moment, as though realizing that he’d gotten carried away with what he’d divulged, even with what he felt.

“She wanted me—” he replied meekly before beginning again. “The last time I saw her, a week ago in the hotel room, before she disappeared, she asked me if I was sure I wanted to help her. When I nodded, she asked me to kneel on the floor and close my eyes, and then she prayed over me. I didn’t like that. It made me feel like all those people, the ones I’ve had to hurt, begging me not to hurt them.”

He spoke haltingly, and it made his face appear pathetic.

“Before I left, she gave me an envelope. She asked me not to open it until I was home alone. It was a letter. Things she couldn’t say in person, I guess.” Victor looked at Mai. “The last thing she wrote was that if something happened to her, I had to protect you. And no matter what, even if it meant hurting her, I had to make sure you got the money. Every last dollar.”

Mai wasn’t even blinking, probably thinking about the money again, but no doubt reminded of her own letters too, wherever they were. I could see it clearly now, the orphan in both of them.

“So where is she now?” she asked.

“She didn’t share that part of her plan — and I have no way of reaching her. We figured the less I know about that, the better.”

“Your mother’s probably long gone then,” I said.

“I’d say yes,” Victor agreed as he pocketed his cell phone.

Mai sat up. “You never told us how you got your share of the money.”

He shook his head. “I didn’t want it.” He rose heavily from the table to put on his jacket, then stood before us with a philosophical air. “She said something. That she’d been asleep all these years, ever since the night she left Vietnam. Got me thinking, I guess — of my last night in Vietnam, the last thirteen years of my life here.”

A ceiling fan spun slowly above his head, dragging shadows across his face. Who knew if the kid truly regretted the shit he’d done for Sonny, but it was clear he didn’t enjoy it anymore. It occurred to me that Suzy had not only been exposing his boss to him, she’d been confessing all the dark ugly things about herself too, the same thing that Victor — maybe without intending to — had just done with us.

He checked his watch and said to Mai, “I’d say you have until eight thirty tonight. At nine my brother and I will be replaced at our post. Mr. Jonathan’s orders. Go home, Chi Mai, and get everything you need, then go back to the Coronado. Park on Ogden Avenue and use the south entrance. My brother won’t see you there. Get your money in room 1215, all of it, and leave town. Go somewhere far away. I’m heading back to the hotel now to do my job, but I will see to it that you’re safe. On my brothers’ lives, I won’t let anyone stop you.”

He ended with something else in Vietnamese, saying it like some soldier going off to war.

I was stirring now, and he turned to me with some of that toughness he’d shed in the last hour or so. “You can’t go though,” he said. “Not yet. Our orders were to watch you tonight and, if nothing happens, let you go in the morning. If you return to your hotel room now and do nothing, then nothing’s going to happen. I’ll give you your car keys at noon tomorrow.”

“That’s it — they just let me go?”

“Miss Hong — she isn’t coming. You’ll be useless to them, don’t you see? And you’re a cop. They can’t hold you here forever.” He looked at me for the first time with something approaching pity. “You’ve been an insurance policy, Officer. That’s as much as I know about it.”

He grabbed his backpack and gave Mai one final glance before walking toward the exit.

11

WE’D BEEN IN THE BAR for almost two hours, and the sun was already setting, the Strip lit up now and aglow amid a sky of sudden gathering clouds that smeared orange below and tinged the air blue.

The bar’s back lot was still mostly empty. A few men had parked their car near us only to wander over to the strip club next door, where the neon lights had become a flashing signpost in the twilight.

The Jeep’s flimsy vinyl top did little to keep out the cold. I zipped up my jacket and asked Mai if it was okay that I smoked.

She was sitting behind the steering wheel with her keys in her hand, her eyes focused on the Stratosphere Tower in the near distance, rising above the surrounding buildings. It was a copy of the Space Needle in Seattle except much taller, both more regal and more vulgar.

I wasn’t sure what we had to discuss first. If Victor’s last words were to be believed, then I’d been given a reprieve, possibly absolution — at the very least a little time now to consider our next step. But my unease had deepened. Leaving town was still a no-brainer. The thought of leaving behind everything Victor just told us, though, was like tugging at a shackle.

Mai spoke up. “Did you believe all that — about my mother?”

“A lot not to believe.”

“Yeah, but that she sees things? Forgets she’s fucked someone?” She glanced at the duffel bag at my feet. I had shoved the videotape in there, buried it in my clothes.

“God, don’t say it like that,” I said, but I could see she was asking me sincerely, as if for confirmation. “What do you want me to tell you? I went through similar shit with her for eight years.”

She seemed ready to say something, but then gestured for a drag of my cigarette. She exhaled smoke through her nose, holding on to the cigarette as she continued eyeing the Stratosphere. The neon lights next door flashed red and blue across her face.

“I’ve seen things too,” she finally said. “Things like that. When I was a kid, I used to see my dad every once in a while. Standing in the doorway of my room at night. Or by the tree below my window. I never saw his face exactly, but I knew it was him because he was bald. Didn’t scare me. Over the years I got used to it. That’s one thing she and I have in common.”

She handed back the cigarette. “You think I’m fucked-up too, don’t you?” She wasn’t looking at me. “It’s been less frequent the last ten years. I sometimes forget that it happens at all. But every time he appears, it’s like she does too, and I end up thinking about them both. Usually happens around the holidays. My very own ghosts of Christmas past.”

Her smile was vacant. She dragged her finger along the top of the dash and left a clean trail in the dust.

“You ever go talk to someone?”

She chuckled. “You mean like a therapist? You kidding? Vietnamese don’t believe in therapy. I vaguely remember my uncle taking me aside about this time twenty years ago and telling me that my mother had to leave town and would be gone for a long while. It took him all of five minutes. He said it like it was something I already knew. I don’t think it upset me at all though. I forget what happened in the following months, if he or my aunt ever explained anything more to me, but I do remember it feeling natural to be without her. ‘Gone for a long while’ meant she’d come back at some point, so I didn’t think any more of it. It’s weird, right? That I would just accept the unexplained disappearance of my mother? That’s how it was for a few years.

“It wasn’t until my fourth Christmas there, when I was watching the end of It’s a Wonderful Life—you know, when Jimmy Stewart gets his old life back and runs home and hugs and kisses the hell out of Donna Reed and all his kids on the stairs? That’s when it hit me that she was gone for good. No one in the family ever mentioned her. It was like she never existed. I started crying then and got real angry — at her, at my aunt and uncle, at my cousins too. Everyone thought I was crying because of the movie.”

She stuck her key into the ignition but left the key chain dangling there.

“That’s rough, kid,” I said. “I can’t imagine.” I offered her the last of the cigarette.

She shrugged, finished the cigarette, and put it out in an ashtray filled with gum wrappers and loose change. She nodded at the Stratosphere. “You know that’s the tallest observation tower in the country? At the top they got a moat and two tall metal fences to keep people away from the edge, but last year some guy still managed to climb the fences and jump off. Fell over a thousand feet. His body hit the roof of the parking garage before landing in some bushes by the valet parking. God knows why he did it. There’s a story going round about people seeing his ghost in the elevators. I rode them up to the top a few weeks ago, to see if I might bump into him. Then I realized I had no idea what he looked like. He could’ve been one of the men in the elevator.”

Her eyes went again to the top of the Stratosphere and followed the phantom falling body down the tower’s white walls. She was playing with a casino chip, blindly flipping it across the knuckles of her right hand so that it seemed to move on its own.

“More suicides here than anywhere in America,” she mused. “I hear about hotel maids finding dead guests in their rooms all the time. In bed, in the bathtub, on the toilet.”

A green minivan pulled up to the strip club and a middle-aged guy stepped out in jeans, sneakers, and a sweatshirt and walked to the entrance like he knew the place well, like he regularly went alone to ogle tits and ass at five in the evening. He could have been my father thirtysomething years ago, heading to the store for milk and coming home with a bottle of Jack.

I said to Mai, “We should get going.”

She turned to me. “What did Victor mean at the end there — you being an insurance policy?”

I’d been waiting for her to ask, though I was loath now to explain it out loud.

“Means that if your mother shows up and they had to hurt her to get their money back, kill her even, they can always blame me, the jealous and bitter ex-husband — tell the police what I did five months ago, that I came back to steal his money, steal his wife, whatever. The story’s adaptable. That’s why my car is here and the hotel room is in my name, paid with my damn credit card too. Just in case they need a story. And if they don’t and your mom doesn’t show, then I am useless to them like Victor said. Sonny would’ve at least had some fun with me.”

Mai was staring out the windshield and still knuckle-rolling the poker chip, her face alive now with concentration.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Seems like you’re much more a liability than insurance. Say my mother shows up and you find out about the money and everything. There’s no way you send her back knowing all that. You sneak her out of the hotel and out of town in a cab or something — and with the money too. They end up losing everything.”

“Yeah, but if I sneak out your mother, I flush out the money. That’s when they swoop in. The money’s what they want, don’t you see? Sonny doesn’t give a shit about getting your mother back. They need me to disobey them.”

“Aren’t those all unnecessary risks? They’d know that. Sonny’s a poker player, after all. You gamble when the odds are in your favor, when the payoff is worth it. If the money’s all he cares about, bringing you here makes no sense. Victor and his brothers could have easily waited at the hotel for her themselves. Why add another potential liability if it’s not absolutely necessary?”

I was startled by how thoroughly she was thinking through all this. Part of me appreciated it. Part of me was annoyed.

“Sonny’s a poker player all right,” I said. “You think he won’t do anything to get back a hundred grand?”

She looked at me sharply. “You think gamblers care only about money?”

“This one shoved a woman down the stairs and tried to put a kitchen knife in my fucking chest. You know he once chopped off a guy’s hand with a cleaver?”

“Even Hitler had a pet dog, a woman he loved.”

“What exactly are we arguing about here?” I glanced at the time and felt like snatching the keys from her and driving the Jeep myself.

“If it’s just about the money, then Sonny would be smarter than this.” She spoke clearly, as if this was what she had intended to say all along. “So maybe it’s just about my mother. He might actually love her enough to take all these dumb unnecessary risks.”

“That’s some logic.”

“It’s not logical. That’s my point. He’s on tilt. He’s the guy at the poker table who’s been losing big in bad ways, and now he’s playing emotional. He’s making decisions he’d never normally make because all he cares about is getting back what he lost — and that’s not always money. What I’m saying is: this whole thing only makes sense if Sonny really does want you to bring my mother back to him.”

“And so what if he does? It doesn’t matter anymore. It’s got nothing to do with what we do next.”

“It does. It makes it easier to trust everything Victor said.”

“I trust no one,” I said, realizing at last what she’d been working toward — and what I had to do now. “I’ll stay,” I declared. “You go. I’ll make sure Sonny gets all his money back, and then he’ll have no reason to care about me or you or anyone.”

She was wielding her sudden silence with one hand gripping the steering wheel, staring past it like a sulking child.

“Come on now,” I told her. “Do I really need to tell you that taking the money is a horrible fucking idea?”

“It’s simple.”

“It’s insane.”

“Victor — the way he talked to me. It’s a Vietnamese thing. I trust him.”

“Doesn’t matter. I don’t trust the situation.”

“You wait it out at the hotel until tomorrow like Victor said. What can they possibly do to you there? I’ll take the money with me tonight and go to LA and wait somewhere for you, and when you get there, I’ll split it with you.”

“Jesus Christ, I don’t want the goddamn money. And have you forgotten I’m a police officer?”

“You told me you already did some bad shit here.”

“What, am I on some downward spiral? I’m not some good cop gone bad, kid.”

“I leave with nothing, then. I let these guys drive me out of town — these guys who think I died twenty years ago.”

“That’s exactly what you do. Look, even if Victor was telling us God’s truth, you take that money and you’re asking for them to find out about you. Remind yourself what they did to Happy — what Victor did. How the hell is he protecting you by telling you to skip town with stolen fucking money? Take me back to the hotel and let me handle this. And forget LA. It’s not far enough. Go to Oakland. A police buddy of mine will put you up. He won’t ask questions. Once I get home and this all blows over, we’ll figure out what to do next.”

The poker chip was now buried in her fist. Her eyes still averted, her voice calm again, she said, “You think it’s just about the money. And it is. Of course it is. But that money means something to me, Robert.”

Her using my name, like we were familiars, reminded me that we had only met three hours ago. She had seemed fully American to me, but what I heard now was that melodramatic tone that immigrants can’t help sometimes, the Vietnamese especially, like a lament for their old country haunting the back of their throat. In her mother’s story, she saw more than just her own ghostly visions, she saw her own loneliness too, her mother’s true legacy.

I swallowed and tried my best not to sound condescending: “I get that. I do. But you can’t be sentimental about this.”

She was shaking her head slowly. “No, you don’t get it. Stealing that money. . it’s the only thing she’s ever done for me. And she owes me, goddamn it. For twenty years, she’s owed me. If I don’t go get it and that asshole gets it all back, then everything that’s happened the last two months, everything I found out today — it won’t mean anything. It’ll be like the last twenty years all over again, except now I’ll know exactly what I’ve lost.”

For once, I had no response. It was like being full and arguing the ethics of stealing food with someone dying of hunger.

She said, “I’m going back to that hotel room and hauling that suitcase out of Vegas with me. You can help me or not, but I’m doing it.”

She turned on the ignition and the Jeep roared to life, trembling violently. She turned to me and her expression was part wary kindness, part obstinate bravado, like she was both asking me to help her and telling me to fuck off.

I sat back in my seat and sighed. “Let’s go get your stuff first.”

Without another word, she thrust the Jeep in gear and we lumbered out of the parking lot. But then she braked at the mouth of the exit, despite the road being clear. She sat there gripping the steering wheel, staring up the road as the blinker flashed the other direction.

“What is it now?” I said.

She raised her voice above the engine. “Happy. She knows I exist.”

“Don’t worry. She took a beating to protect you. If she didn’t tell them then, she’ll never tell them.”

“But what else might she know about my mother? Where she’s going. What else she’s done — or might do. We don’t even know if she’s left town yet. We’re just assuming she has.”

“Make up your mind, girl. You want the money, don’t you? Then let me worry about everything else.”

“You want to know too. You’re dying to know. We could ask Happy.”

“I told you — I don’t know where she lives or even what her number is.”

“But I know where she works. She was wearing a casino uniform that afternoon.” Mai pointed up the road at the Stratosphere. “There’s a chance she could be there right now.”

I looked at the tower, its neon-red antennae piercing the thick clouds. I was shaking my head, but I wasn’t sure at what.

“What if she ends up disappearing too?” Mai persisted. “This might be our only chance to talk to her. You want to risk losing your only chance to find out the rest of the story?”

“What rest of the story?”

“You haven’t figured it out yet. She’s the woman Sonny was having an affair with. She’s my mother’s best friend — her only friend — and yet my mother goes to Victor for help instead of her?”

Mai had turned on her other blinker, and her eyes flickered at me with certainty now — with enthusiasm. I thought of how her stubbornness was a kind of fearlessness, a reveling in the unknown.

We tumbled out of the parking lot and onto Paradise Road. I was clenching the Jeep’s grab bar. It had never crossed my mind that Happy might be involved with Sonny, but deeper than my shock was the suspicion that I’d been wrong about this and possibly many other things.

“Some best friend,” Mai said as she steered us toward the Stratosphere.

“I should’ve known,” I muttered, though I suspected it would always baffle me why that stupid woman — or any woman — would take up with a man like Sonny.