Dragonfish

part four

This man who once saved your life, he is not a bad man. Nor a good one. I have long given up on what it means exactly to be either, but I am confident now that you must know one to know the other. Perhaps this is the other reason why I’ve often thought of him alongside your father. You did too, long ago.

How it turned out then that he, who saved you, ruined me is something I must also explain to you, except I don’t know how. It feels like it happened twice without me knowing it. Even as I sit here writing these words decades later, a world away in America, in a desert far from the sea, I am still living on that island where he first met me and I first came to need him. Everything that has happened since seems a shadow of what happened there. Even everything that has led me here to this quiet room.

But let me say one thing. Let me write it down so that it will never again be a question in my own mind. If I have suffered, it has been because of myself. I blame nothing and no one else.

The Sunday after he fished you out of the ocean, I took you to Mass at the island chapel, and during communion I remained seated, abstaining for the first time in my life. You wouldn’t stop looking at me, confused that I wasn’t doing something you’d always seen me do. You had no understanding yet of the sacraments and how communion is only for those in a state of grace. You had no idea that days before I had closed my eyes while the ocean was swallowing you whole.

I watched communion end and realized that no priest or prayer or ritual could ever make things right, not because what I did was unforgivable but because forgiveness suddenly meant nothing to me. As we walked home afterward, I felt a lightness inside, like an absence, as though some spirit had burrowed into me and then burrowed back out, taken part of me with it and left me unrecognizable to myself.

We passed the junk woman who roamed the camp asking for people’s discards and sold them out of two plastic milk crates at the market. I reached into my pocket for the jade rosary, your father’s first gift to me, and was ready to hand it over to her, but then I remembered that you had taken it from my limp hands during Mass. You were now holding it, wrapped around your palm, as you rummaged through the woman’s crate of empty jars and mismatched sandals. The woman gave me a disapproving look, nodding at you, and remarked that rosaries weren’t toys, but I paid her no mind.

You picked up a dusty red book and flipped through its blank pages. It was a journal. Only the first three pages had handwriting.

Mother woke up coughing this morning, the first sentence read, and it was raining so she called for me to open the window.

I bought the journal and brought it home with us. Although I’d been a reader all my life, I’d never written anything outside of a few letters to my sister when your father and I lived in Pleiku. It seemed strange now to write something to myself, for myself. So I turned to the first blank page and began an overdue letter to my mother. I could get no further than a description of our hut. I started a letter to my sister but managed only a halfhearted greeting. Finally, I wrote down your father’s name. Only then did the words come.

An hour later, I had written six pages, recounting random stories from my youth that were unknown to him, things that had happened when he was in prison, thoughts I never shared with him because I did not know how. Every word, however, instead of bringing me closer to him, moved me further away, so that it also seemed I was writing stories about someone else, a letter to a stranger about another stranger.

I think it was then that I stuffed the jade rosary into the cigar box, where it would remain for almost twenty years.

I sought out Son that afternoon. I left you in the care of our housemates and went to Zone A, where I’d heard he and his son lived.

It took over an hour and cost me some suspicious looks from people I asked, but I finally found their hut. The boy was sitting outside on a large tree stump, his back to me. He was peering up at the hilltop where the bell from the Buddhist temple had been tolling only minutes before. Midday chants now filled the air from a lone monk somewhere in the trees, and the boy was listening with his hands in his lap.

I remained still until the chants ended. When he stood from the stump and saw me, he withdrew a step. I’d only ever seen him from a distance at the promontory, and I noticed now how handsome he already was, much more so than his father, who seemed hewn out of stone. He must have been no older than eight at the time.

I asked him if his father was there. He said, No ma’am. Then I asked if his father had gone fishing, and recognition flickered in his eyes. Perhaps he had seen us at the promontory after all. He said, My father never tells me where he goes.

I took a step closer, smiling as best I could, and asked if he was hungry and showed him my plastic bag. It contained three eggs, a can of sardines, and a baguette.

Let me fry some eggs for you, I said. Your father did something kind for me the other day, and I want to thank him. Do you have a pan?

The boy considered my face for a moment as if searching for a reason to distrust me. Finally he said, Yes, ma’am.

Inside their tiny hut, a fishing net turned hammock hung above a bed built expertly out of tree bark and planks from the sunken refugee boats. I remembered being impressed by that bed, by the cardboard box of neatly folded clothes beside it, and by their dirt floor, which looked swept, even around the stone fire pit. Atop the stones was their frying pan. I noticed no cross on the walls, no Buddha or altar or anything.

I fried the eggs with the sardines and made two sandwiches out of the baguette. I watched the boy carefully eat one sandwich as he sat on the bed.

I said, That monk chanting. . it’s very nice, isn’t it? So beautiful and calm.

He finished chewing and swallowed before saying, Yes, ma’am. I listen every afternoon. He was about to take another bite but then added, as if pointing out something pleasant, It sounds like the dead are singing.

His sincerity startled me and I found myself smiling. I wrapped the other sandwich in newspaper and said, This one is for your father. Please tell him I came by, the woman with the little girl he helped.

He won’t like that you were here.

He won’t? Then why did you let me in?

You asked if I was hungry, and I was. You wouldn’t have left anyway. I saw it in your face.

He was speaking matter-of-factly, almost kindly, but it still felt like an accusation.

Tell him I insisted on coming in, I said. And that this sandwich is my only way of thanking him. I’ll stop by again tomorrow afternoon, and he can yell at me then.

I left before the boy could protest, but as I was walking away from the hut, I heard him call me from the doorway. He was holding his half-eaten sandwich.

My father didn’t mean to hurt you the other day, he said. He just didn’t know how scared you were. I saw my mother drown at sea, and there was nothing I could do either.

Many months later, after you and I arrived in the States and came to live with your father’s uncle in Los Angeles, I saw the boy at a grocery store. It had to have been him. He was alone in the canned soup aisle, looking through the shelves. It took me a moment to realize that he was actually rearranging them, lining up the cans and turning the labels face-out as though it was his job. There was so much purpose on his face.

I was at the other end of the aisle and thought about approaching him to say hello, at least to make sure that it was really him, but then his father’s voice somewhere nearby, calling for him, made my heart jump. I rushed away and told your granduncle I had a headache and went to wait outside in the car.

The boy and his father, I knew, had also been sponsored to Los Angeles. For months after that encounter, until the day I finally left for good, I looked for them every time I stepped into a grocery store.

The following afternoon I found them both asleep, Son in the hammock and the boy on the bed. Son’s eyes opened a moment after I stepped inside the doorway.

I’ve brought you all some pork, I said. My bag also contained a bunch of spinach and fresh garlic and ginger.

He sat up in his hammock. Go cook for your daughter, he said. I don’t need you to thank me.

The boy was awake now and peering at my bag. For the two months they’d been at the camp, they had probably eaten nothing but fish. The Malaysians, mostly Muslim, outlawed pork in the camp, but I had bought some that morning from smugglers who secretly visited the island every week. I traded in one of three gold rings that I had sewn into the waistband of my pants, and still had enough money to make a week of meals. As many as it would take.

I avoided Son’s eyes and asked the boy for their ration of fish sauce and rice. He turned to his father, whose only response was to climb down from the hammock and walk past me out of the hut.

I sliced the pork and sautéed it in fish sauce with ginger and some salt and sugar, stir-fried the spinach with garlic, and made rice. I fixed a bowl for the boy and told him to eat, then prepared a second bowl. The smell brought your father’s ghost into the hut. I had to hold back my tears when the boy looked up, chopsticks in hand, and asked me if I wasn’t going to eat with him.

Outside, Son was sitting on the tree stump and whittling a long bamboo pole to fish with. He didn’t look up until I was standing beside him. With his small knife, he gestured at the bowl of food in my hands and said, I don’t know what was wrong with you that day, and I don’t care. Maybe God or whoever cares but I don’t, so doing all this makes no difference to me.

He returned to his whittling. He would have been thirty-one at the time, and I twenty-four, both of us impossibly young it seems to me now, though in that moment I could see that we had each aged years in a matter of months.

I set the bowl of food beside him on the stump. Anh Son, I said and waited for him to look up. You lost your wife and I have lost my husband. I am here to help us forget that for a little while.

I brought you with me the following day. Neither Son nor the boy appeared surprised. The boy made room for you to sit on the bed, right beneath his father who remained in his hammock, staring at the ceiling as you stared at the cocoon of his body above your head. Only the boy watched me as I cooked lunch.

After we ate, the boy helped me clean up. He was like a woman that way, thoughtful and thorough in how he tidied everything. I asked him to please take you outside to play. I explained that I needed to talk with his father. You sat put and looked suspicious of the boy’s obedience to me. But when he offered you his hand, you softened and let him lead you outside. Those eyes of his must have convinced you.

Son and I sat staring at the open doorway, the white sunlight outside. His silence made me hold my breath, but I know now that what frightened me was myself. For days, I’d been driven by the sensation that I was once again the person I’d been before you came into the world, only touched now by a profound loneliness that that person never knew. This loneliness, though vast and terrifying, was the most genuine thing I’d ever felt. If I had become someone worse, someone undeserving of forgiveness or understanding, at least it was someone I had created.

I went to pull the drapes over the doorway, casting us into darkness. Son was already beside me, his thick fingers around my neck, pulling me to him.

Every day you and I arrived before noon and would not leave until dark. I cooked lunch and dinner, combining all our rations with the fish they caught and the extra food I bought at the market. I ended up selling all three of my gold rings. We ate well, and it took no time for Son to start talking more and even smiling. Whatever he still felt about what I’d done, he had either set it aside, close beneath the surface of his contentment, or simply absorbed it into the sudden familiarity between us. He was quick to upbraid me when I overcooked the fish or didn’t comb my hair, and in these moments his voice betrayed tremors of his outrage that day on the promontory. But I soon discovered that placating him was as easy as asking his opinion on something as if only he had the answer. He loved explaining things, himself especially. He was affirming his existence in the world.

After lunch we would all make the long, quiet walk together to the promontory where he and his boy fished and swam and took naps on the rocks. We spent a few afternoons at the remote beach farther down the path, luxuriating in the white sand, but when a few young people started showing up, we decided to keep to the promontory, where we were always hidden. There was better fishing there anyway.

You soon insisted on fishing too, so Son obliged you with detailed lessons that you followed with enthusiasm and care. You didn’t want to disappoint him. He even taught you to swim, though you could only go a few meters at a time, the boy always there as your buoy.

I often sat in the shade and wrote in my journal. More letters to your father. Long letters that I would start one day and finish the next. Certain afternoons, I hardly looked up from the journal. The boy once asked me what I was writing, and when I told him they were letters, he asked me to whom. I just smiled and said, Someone who will never read them. This satisfied him as though he understood exactly what I meant.

Sometimes I did little more than sit there and watch you all, or listen as Son told stories from his youth about how he caught more fish and swam faster than every boy in town, about his days running with the neighborhood gang, the time he chased down a thief who tried to steal the family bicycle. I suspected these stories were really for me, even though he was telling them to you and the boy and rarely looked my way.

When he and I were alone, I waited for the stories he never told. About his wife or his time as a soldier or his two years in the concentration camps, just like your father. I also wanted to know, from his own lips, about that incident on the island that kept everyone away from him except me and you. He would have told me all these things, I think, had I only asked.

One day you pointed at his right ear and asked him what had happened to it. The top tip of it was missing, an old injury perhaps. In bed, I sometimes stared at the scar while he slept and imagined some animal biting him and him crying afterward.

I hurt it a long time ago, he replied. Nothing you need to know.

Why not? you said.

He fixed you with his eyes and called you by your name for the very first time. From now on, he said, if you ask me something and I say no, you don’t ask me again.

You looked startled and embarrassed and did not say another word. For the rest of that day, you stole searching glances at him as though you were invisible and waiting desperately to reappear. I knew then that a future with him was possible.

For weeks, we hardly saw or spoke to anyone. The four of us were like a conspiracy. People started talking, watching us every day as we walked off to our secret place. Who knows what aroused their judgment more, that I was a young mother taking up with a new man or that the new man was an outcast. What kind of woman forgets her husband so quickly, replaces him so easily? What kind of woman falls for a man who hacked off another man’s fingers? They must have imagined me a happy woman.

Every Sunday morning I awoke on my pallet like a lost traveler, unfamiliar with where I had arrived, unaware of how I had gotten there. The church bell would toll a dozen times, each slow dong a reminder of what I was doing, and I would try to sleep through them despite the looks from our housemates who now walked to Mass without us, and despite you nudging my shoulder to remind me it was Sunday and then rolling back to sleep once I shook my head or simply ignored you.

Around Son, I tried to appear content, and soon I found that his presence actually calmed me, filled me with purpose, made me forget sometimes that I had no idea what the future held. I was more quiet around him than I’d been around anyone in my life. I spoke only when I needed to, and with a confidence that disarmed him yet aroused something fierce inside him too.

He would take me the second we were alone. He would not ask. He would not say a word. At first it frightened me, how he’d grab my wrists and hold them down and cast all his weight upon me, dive into me, never looking into my eyes until he had finished and come up for air. His smell, the ferocity in his breath, the pain I felt afterward. It frightened me because I enjoyed it, thrilled in it, because I would often hurry you and the boy away and would forget you both entirely as soon as his hands were upon me. I felt possessed and yet also in possession of myself for the first time ever, though only months before, even as I knew your father was dying, I was still the young girl who could not imagine being with any other man, who prayed every night for miracles she knew could not come to pass. When I was with Son, I was mourning that girl, and I suppose that was what frightened me the most.

In America, I spent years trying to retrace how he and I came to need each other on that island, and it’s only in finding him again that I understand that people need each other not for reasons they can measure or explain in detail. It happens in an instant, when life becomes startlingly new and frightening and profound, and you turn to the person next to you and see that they feel it too.

Those were happy days for you. You were eating and talking more and the swimming had tanned you and made you stronger. Sometimes I watched you in your happiness and saw someone else’s child. I would see the three of you walking together down that path, you holding the boy’s hand and talking up at Son, asking or telling him things in your loudest voice as if to measure up to him through sheer volume, be deserving of him, and he would listen to you and correct you and respond in his long-winded way, and you would all look like a family that I was not a part of, which filled me first with contentment and then inevitably with despair.

You awoke me one night, your fingers grasping my arm. You had heard your father’s voice calling us, and when you peeked outside our hut, you saw him by the palm trees. He’s just standing there, you said, but I can’t see his face.

Don’t say such things, I told you. That’s impossible. You were dreaming.

In truth, I believed you. I had not yet forgotten that woman on the beach. Some nights her voice still startled me awake, though I never knew if it echoed from my dreams or from the world outside. It terrified me now to imagine your father out there roaming the night alongside her.

You tried to pull me up by the arm. Your eyes were tearing up. For weeks, ever since Son entered our lives, you had not mentioned your father or showed any confusion that we were around this new man all the time, that I was cooking for him and spending time alone with him, talking to him as I had only talked with your father. To my relief, you finally seemed willing to let someone else in.

But that night I realized that your father still shadowed your every thought. You looked both frightened and hopeful that he was out there.

I should have told you then of his death. I should not have waited as long as I did. In your eyes I could see my own sadness, that pang of recognition I still feel to this day when I think of him.

To save our housemates from waking, I let you lead me outside. We stood near the doorway, beneath a full moon, and watched the palm trees and their broad arms swaying in the breeze.

You must have seen a shadow, I told you.

You shook your head and said, It was him, Mother. He stands that way.

When we returned to our pallets, you hugged my arm and laid your cheek against it. You had not slept this close to me since our nights on the boat. A small part of me wanted you to remain this way forever.

Our very first night in America, it happened again. We had moved into a two-bedroom apartment with your father’s uncle, who I had only met briefly one other time, and his wife and three teenage children, who I had never met at all. We were sleeping in the living room, you on the couch and me below you on the carpet. I remember waking with a start and finding you beside me, your eyes blinking in the darkness.

You whispered that your father had just wandered through the living room and into the kitchen. You had said his name out loud, but he did not hear you. When you followed him into the kitchen, no one was there.

I think it was a ghost, you declared as though you had just decided to believe in such things. When you rolled over to face me, I realized you were not lying beside me because you were afraid. You had come close to ask a question.

Does that mean that Father is gone? you said.

I did not let my thoughts give me hesitation. Yes, I said, and let that linger for a moment. The rest came out like a slow exhalation. A few months ago, I told you, your father went to sleep and did not wake up. He was very sick. There was nothing that anyone could do to help him. But he’s with God now, and he’s watching over you. He visited you tonight to let you know that.

Your only reaction was to glance again at the dark kitchen. I had considered never telling you at all, just letting you find out on your own. Now I could see that you had already done that. The old people call it a sixth sense, but I knew it was that mystical connection you shared with your father. On some level, I truly did believe that he was watching over you, that he had passed me over and whispered his farewell in your ear alone. You needed nothing more from me that night than confirmation.

After a while you said, I hope he visits me every night. You climbed back onto the sofa and wrapped yourself in your blanket. I waited for you to start crying to yourself, that distant lonely sound you made, but all I could hear were your cousins snoring in their room nearby.

In the coming months, you would befriend your cousins, play games with them, learn their American ways and bicker with them like a stubborn baby sister, eventually sharing their room while I slept alone on the sofa. You started kindergarten and soon spoke words I could not understand. You enjoyed hot dogs and hamburgers and other foods I could not eat. You watched television and sang songs I did not know. Not once, that entire time, did you mention your father. If you mourned him, you did so in your own way and kept that part of you, as with every other part, closed to me.

I wonder now if he did visit you again in the night. As you got older, did he ever appear at your bedside or walk past the doorway of your cousins’ bedroom? Or did you grow up and stop believing in ghosts?

I should tell you now that I am writing these letters in a room that is not my own. I am alone and it is always night when I am here. Outside my hotel window, I see lights glittering and flashing. You’ve seen these same lights, I’m sure. They never stop, never go out, not even during the day. Perhaps that is why I’ve remained in this city for as long as I have. Here, the world outside always feels awake and alive with the stories it wants desperately to tell you, so long as you are willing to listen. Nothing here to remind you that the lights will one day go out, that all stories end whether you want them to or not.

Son ended up telling us about his ear. It was drizzling at the promontory one afternoon, and as you and I and the boy sat together beneath some tree branches, Son sat happily in the open, shirtless as always, with water trickling down his lips.

My father loved to drink, he said suddenly. When I was thirteen, he was stabbed in a fight and was too drunk to know how bad it was. I came home from school that day and the house was empty. Everyone had gone to the hospital. The only thing I found was a bloodstain on the couch the size of our cat.

Son was grinning as he spoke. From the way the boy was listening, I could tell he had never heard this story. But Son was not looking at him or at you. He was speaking directly to me, as if sharing the proudest experience of his life.

His father, he said, had fought the North Vietnamese for years, almost half of Son’s childhood, and he returned from the war a drunk and a gambler, disappearing sometimes for two or three days to booze and play cards with people who weren’t even his friends. He would then come home and pass out on his bed for an entire day.

He had gotten into an argument that afternoon with a man who owed him money from a card game. In their scuffle in the street, the man pulled out a switchblade and stuck him in the belly. People tried to help, but Son’s father shooed them away. He walked the two blocks home all on his own, holding his belly like someone with a stomachache, and collapsed onto the front couch. When the family found him, they thought he was passed out as usual. They would have ignored him if not for the blood.

The man who stabbed him owned the bar down the street and had a wife and two young children. He also had ties to the local gang. No one dared report the incident. Son’s father, after all, had walked away from the fight as if nothing had happened.

So while his father lay in the hospital and his mother prayed all day at church, Son sat at a café across from the bar for over a week and watched the man eat dinner with his family, beat his kids in the street, yell at his wife, and play cards all day with his buddies. One afternoon, on a full-moon day, after the man and his family had walked off to temple, Son stole into their home through a back window. Even at that age, he was expert at prying open anything with a hinge.

He was carrying a kitchen knife from home, which he used to slash their bedsheets and pillows, their couch, the posters and tapestries on their walls. In the kitchen, he poured out every liquid he could find. Milk, soup, alcohol, cooking oil, fish sauce. All over the floor. He opened their rice canister and urinated into it. He spit into their jars of bean curd and shrimp paste. He did all this as quietly as he could.

The last thing he remembered doing was going to their Buddha shrine and breaking all the candles and incense sticks, shoving the banana offerings in his mouth and spitting out mush onto the Buddha figurine. This was when he felt a hand grab hold of his hair and jerk him backward. He saw the man’s calm yellow eyes for only a second before a punch knocked him to the ground. His face felt broken.

Son was chuckling as he was telling this part of the story. I spit out bloody gobs of banana! he exclaimed and glared wildly at me. I tried to smile for him, shaking my head in disbelief despite not knowing what perplexed me more, the story he was recounting or the way he was recounting it.

The man was a head taller than Son and twice his weight. He dragged him by his hair into the kitchen. Son was crying at this point. Bawling. He tried to get up and run but slipped on the wet floor. The man kicked him in the stomach, which knocked the life out of him. Then he planted his shoe on Son’s face.

You think I don’t see you out there every day? he said. Spying on me like some Viet Cong? Tell me, what should a man do to someone who destroys his home? He unsheathed a switchblade.

Son squeezed his eyes shut, too petrified to struggle as the man seized a handful of his hair and sawed it off, then another handful, then another, so rough and vigorous with the knife that Son hardly felt the blade slice the tip of his ear. Then he screamed, but the man did not stop.

When he finally opened his eyes, the man was standing over him with an unlit cigarette between his lips. He pocketed the blade and tossed Son a towel for his ear. He pulled out his wallet, counted out some bills, and reached down and shoved the cash into Son’s mouth.

Stop crying or I’ll cut your throat, he said. That’s the money I owe your father. I would have given it to him if he had asked nicely.

Son’s ear hurt too much for him to know yet that he wasn’t going to die. What’s more, it spooked him how calmly the man spoke, how clean he looked despite the mess around them.

He ordered Son to stand up. Look at me, he said. Are you satisfied? Is all this enough for what I did to your father?

All Son managed to say over and over was, I’m sorry, sir, I’m so sorry.

The man shook his head. Don’t be sorry, you idiot. Be a man. Next time you want to get back at another man, stab him in the heart. Don’t piss in his rice.

He called out a name, and a big ugly fellow appeared as though he’d been waiting outside the kitchen the entire time. After he was given instructions, he took Son by the arm and led him away. Son waited until they reached the alley behind the house, and then he threw up all over his own feet.

At this last memory, Son laughed loudest and did not seem to mind that we were all silent and serious, waiting for him to continue. I glanced at you and was reminded of your expression on the boat when that woman jumped overboard. I had been too engrossed in Son’s story to see how disturbing it might be for a child your age. But it was too late at that point. And you were never a child your age anyway.

It was still drizzling, and Son wiped his face with his hands. The grin vanished. That ugly man, he said, was the ugliest man he’d ever seen. He remembered staring at his acne scars and wondering if his own face looked worse. The man dragged him to a house at the end of the alley. An old woman lived there. She must have been a nurse or doctor of some kind because she gave Son medicine and stitched up his ear and bandaged it. She shaved his head and cleaned the cuts on his scalp and face, and then made him bathe and gave him new clothes. She handled him with care but never once looked him in the eye or uttered a word. The ugly man also remained silent until the very end, which was when he pointed at the door and said, Go home.

When Son’s mother saw him, she nearly screamed. She was used to him getting into fights, but he had never come home like this. He told her he crashed his bike and that a farmer had found him and helped him. She didn’t believe a word of it, though she said nothing more. Her eyes were quiet with exhaustion. She was still busy waiting for his father to die.

But his father did not die. Nor did he change his ways. Son never told him what happened that day, what he had done for him. And he never gave him the money. It was almost fifty thousand dong, the price of a new bicycle. He stashed it in a pair of old shoes for over three years until the day his father stumbled drunk into the street outside their house one rainy afternoon and was hit by an ice truck. The evening after his funeral, Son took out the money and bought into a card game at that man’s bar. He was barely seventeen, only two years away from becoming, like his dead father, a soldier and a killer of other men. The man recognized him immediately but said nothing. Son lost everything to him in less than an hour.

When Son finished his story, he looked at me and shrugged as if none of it mattered. I struggled for something to say. In the silence that followed, he lay down on his back, closed his eyes, and let the rain beat down upon him.

I wonder if he had ever told anyone this story before us. He might have once, before they were married, lain beside his wife in bed and, as they spoke of those things we all share before falling asleep, suddenly excavated this memory with a mixture of pride and shame and muted desire. What did she say to him afterward? Did she take his hand and squeeze it and whisper her astonishment? Or did she turn from him in the darkness and say nothing?

On our way to the promontory a few days later, Son began speaking to me in an unusually quiet voice. You and the boy were ahead of us on the path. Their paperwork had begun, he said, and a Baptist church in Sacramento, California, had offered to sponsor him and the boy. This was great news for them because Son had no family in the States. And also because he knew your father’s uncle lived in Los Angeles and was sponsoring you and me.

He said he would make his way to Los Angeles as soon as he could, and find work, in a restaurant or a garage, maybe on a fishing boat, and then he would save up money and open his own restaurant where I could cook and host and do whatever I wanted. He would buy a house for all four of us and put you and the boy through school, and also buy a car, one for me as well. He said all this as if stating facts.

I couldn’t tell if marriage had no part in his plans or if it had already become, without my knowing, an unspoken agreement between us. In any case, I held my breath until he finished his day dream. I thought for a moment more and said, I want to ask you for something. You must promise not to think I am crazy.

Son kept his eyes on the path.

I will do everything you say, I said. I will work with you, live with you, cook for you, everything. All I ask is that you give me one year to be on my own. To be alone. Just one year. I will go somewhere, anywhere, I don’t know where yet. But I promise I will come back. I just want to know that you will take care of my daughter, and that you will not think I am crazy. I’ll come back and we can all be a family, and I will never ask you for anything ever again.

Son would not look at me. His face was unchanged.

I was waiting for his questions. Where could I possibly go? What would I do for an entire year, alone in an alien country, no money, no knowledge of anything? It sounded ridiculous even to me. And yet nothing made more sense. All I needed, I thought, was the chance to know what it was like to be unneeded, unwanted, unfettered. Only then could I return to the world as something other than what I had been for the last five years, this misshapen creature full of bitterness and barren of all desire.

I believed at the time that Son would understand all this. His story the previous day had been a confession, if not out of shame then out of a need for me to see him for the man he was and accept it anyway. So now it was my turn. I was ready to tell him about your father and the years after the war, about the day you were born and what I’d suffered every day since, about what happened at sea with that woman and the boy she thought she lost, about my encounter with her on the beach and how I still saw her every night in my dreams, dressed like me and holding you by the hand, guiding you to the edge of a cliff. I was willing to tell him everything, no matter what he might think or say.

But he remained silent for the rest of the walk.

At the promontory, he went directly to his fishing spot down in the cove and ignored everyone. By then you already knew not to bother him during these moods, so you fished in silence next to the boy while I watched you all from above, sitting in my writing spot beneath the trees.

The waters were choppy that day, and I called out for you to be careful. The boy moved closer to you and offered me a reassuring wave. You ignored me.

Some time later, I saw you jump to your feet. You had a catch on your line, which rarely happened, and you were trying desperately to haul it in on your own. The boy was directing and encouraging you, but a moment later your hands were empty and you were peering into the water despondently.

You turned to Son at once and apologized for losing the pole. He took no notice of you, so you wandered over to the far side of the cove to sit by yourself, as though that was your punishment, self-imposed.

A brown gull soon landed on the steep stairway of rocks above you. You got up to get closer to it, and stood there entranced for some time, watching it preen its feathers. The next time I looked back, you were mounting the rocks.

I called out to you and the boy looked up. You had climbed about three meters when the gull flew onto some higher rocks. This didn’t stop you, and again I called out your name. The boy had set down his pole and made his way over to scold you down the rocks. You were out of reach at this point, and still moving steadily up that craggy staircase. Again, the gull flapped its wings and this time alighted on a ledge that was high up enough now to be level with where I was standing on the promontory, watching everything. I had stopped calling you, afraid that my voice might distract you from your climb. You did not seem afraid though. You moved with such purpose and skill.

But then your foot slipped and I screamed out, and that was when I saw Son hurrying along that far side of the cove. He vanished around the corner. A few moments later, he reappeared on the ledge above you. He kicked at the gull and it flew away, and then he leaned over the edge and waited for you with an outstretched hand. As soon as you were within reach, he grabbed your arm and hauled you up onto the ledge.

He was kneeling in front of you now, holding both your arms and chiding you for your recklessness. As soon as I breathed a sigh of relief, I saw him slap you across the face. I heard the slap. It knocked you back a step, and you began crying instantly.

Don’t touch her! I cried out.

That’s when he finally turned his glare on me. Even from that distance, I could tell that his anger had nothing to do with you, that there was venom there, clarity in the way he clutched your tiny arm and gazed calmly at me.

You’re hurting her arm! I shouted, weakly.

You yelled something at him too, fearlessly for once, but he kept his eyes on me. When you wrested your arm away, he grabbed it again, muttering something to you as you shook your head vigorously. He pulled you over to the edge of the ledge and pointed down at the deep waters, more than eight meters below. You flashed me a frantic look and tried to pull yourself back.

Stop it! I was screaming, but before I was halfway down the path, he had already thrown you over the edge.

You hit the water hard and disappeared. The boy leaped in. By the time I reached the cove, he had you above the surface of the rough waters with your arms wrapped around his neck. As he swam you to the rocks, your face was too full of concentration to show any emotion, and when I lifted you out, you were heavier than you had ever been in my arms. You clung to me. I can still feel your violent breathing there on my neck, below my left ear.

Son was peering down at us from above, a dark faceless figure in the bright sunlight. I was waiting for him to say something, to fling down his accusations.

He barked at the boy, who gave me one final glance before grabbing the fishing poles and hurrying away to follow his father. We never saw them again on the island.

Son didn’t need to say anything, of course. He had finally figured out that I had come to him not to give myself, but to give you. It was what I wanted from him all along. It was what I believed I needed.

You must wonder why I thought to abandon you with a stranger instead of with your granduncle and his family. The truth was that I was terrified of changing my mind. I wanted the choice to leave and the choice to come back. Asking Son was my only hope. I must have loved him then because I believed every word I said, every promise I made, even ones I should have known would never be kept.

In the end, how much distance lies between the truth and what we believe to be true? Between the things we feel at one time and the things we end up doing?

It still startles me, what he did to you. In the moments after it happened, I went from rage to a sudden numbing clarity, overcome by a sadness I had never experienced, not even with your father’s death, because as Son and the boy disappeared into the sunlight and out of our lives that afternoon, I realized that I did not and would not ever know what I wanted, and that in not knowing I would always hurt someone.

So it was on a cold December morning, many months later in America, that I was stricken again by this sadness and knew I could not bear it this time. I stepped onto a bus and let it take me as far away from you as possible. In my mind I kept riding that bus for the next eighteen years, never sure of who I was becoming and constantly waiting for you or someone to reappear like an avenging ghost, until one day Son of all people reappeared. It’s outrageous to me now, a fateful trick from God perhaps, that he would be the one to step back into my life. But by then, after so many years, he seemed like a savior to me. By then I had spent two decades burying your father and forgetting you. I had twice made another life for myself. I had even married another man, a good man who helped me disappear into that other life, however briefly, though I ended up hurting him as well and finally realized that other lives are not possible, not for me or him or you or anyone. The life you leave behind never dies. It inevitably outlives you, my daughter, just as you will outlive me.

So when Son once again offered me a future with him, I accepted this time. Out of love and regret and fear and also, I suppose, exhaustion. We forgave each other by not mentioning the past. We conspired against it in our silence. Just as a child might close its eyes in the presence of something frightening. Just as I had done so many times before.

But that is another story. I have twenty years’ worth of stories I can tell you, each one inevitably a shadow of the other. Which ones do I tell now?

I’ve tried to explain myself and lay bare whatever truth I can find in the things I’ve done and the things I’ve let happen. Yet it seems the more I explain, the more I muddy the truth. My one story becomes so many other stories that I feel I can never properly tell it to you, that once you finish reading these words, if you ever do read them, you will be worse off.

So what I tell myself is that I haven’t been writing to you at all, or even to myself. I’ve been writing to someone who does not exist, a child of my imagination. That is the only happiness, after all, to tell the truth without making anyone suffer.

The last time I saw you, you were asleep in bed with one of your cousins. It was morning, cold and stormy outside.

Your cousin had pulled the covers away from you in the night. I stood by your bedroom door in my work clothes and watched you toss and turn, searching for warmth in your sleep. Your cousin’s old pajamas were a size too big on you and made you look again like the infant I once held to my bosom. I remember rooting for you to take back the covers, but after a while you gave up and settled back into a deep sleep.

On the dresser, beside a photograph of you and your cousins at the zoo, I set down an envelope with your name written on it and $2,500 inside. Your granduncle had gotten me a job at a friend’s restaurant, so I had spent six months riding the bus to work every morning, then cleaning and cutting vegetables, bussing tables, sweeping every inch of that place three times a day. I left you half of all the money I had in the world.

All of it would not have been enough, I know, but I should have still left you everything and sought my way in the world naked and empty.

I thought briefly about leaving a long letter for your granduncle, at least to tell him what to say to you, but I knew no letter of any length could properly explain what I was about to do. So under his bedroom door, I slipped a note saying that I was leaving for good and I was sorry to him and everyone. I can only imagine what he ended up telling you. If he lied, he had a right to. I deserve his scorn as much as yours.

In the living room, the Christmas tree stood blinking in the early-morning dark. It was an American tradition that your granduncle, to my surprise, had taken up, and I had slept next to it for weeks with those red and emerald lights blinking in my dreams, as they still do nowadays at Christmastime, even though I avoid the tradition altogether.

All I carried to the bus stop was an umbrella and my old knapsack that held my purse, one change of clothing, and the cigar box of trinkets and photographs I knew I would eventually have to discard, one by one.

Two weeks before this, I had come home from work to an empty apartment. It was the first time I had been there alone. I looked in the bedrooms to see if anyone might be asleep but soon found myself slowly roaming the entire apartment, picking up objects I had never dared touch, looking through drawers and cabinets and shelves, the odds and ends of people who were still strangers to me.

You must know too well now that your father’s uncle was a shy and private man. He said only four words to me when I met him at my wedding to your father, and though he provided all he could for me in those months I lived there, I don’t recall us having a conversation that lasted more than a minute.

In his bedroom closet, on the shelf above his neatly ironed shirts and pants hanging nestled against your grandaunt’s dresses, were rows of shoeboxes stacked three or four high to the ceiling. I started with the topmost ones and worked my way down. I found jewelry, old shoes, candles, music tapes, seashells, various papers, and count less photographs, mostly things that apparently belonged to your grandaunt.

One box contained stacks of old letters that had been written, in his flawless penmanship, by your granduncle to your grandaunt during the four years he lived alone in America, having escaped the country right after Saigon fell. I sat there reading them for almost an hour. Many were about nothing more than what he ate that day or what he had been doing to bring her and the children to America. Some detailed his loneliness and his longing for her, for Vietnam, for his old life back home.

Then I opened a letter that began with him asking for her forgiveness. I did not intend to, he wrote, but I’ve sinned against you and God. He had been with another woman in America, had loved her deeply, and was now confessing everything to your grandaunt as she was preparing to come to the States with the children. He explained every detail of the affair, how he and the woman had met, how his loneliness had led him to her, how awful he felt the entire time, and how he ultimately ended the relationship out of his duty to God and to her. It was quite honest, I thought. Perhaps too honest. Details no woman would have wanted to know. He ended the letter by asking again for her forgiveness and swearing to the Lord that he would spend the rest of his days making amends for what he had done. Nowhere in the letter did he say that he still cared for your grandaunt, that his feelings for her had not changed since they parted, that his love for the other woman was just a temporary displacement of his real love for her.

He sounded like an entirely different person. The man I knew was as devout as a priest, as emotional as a monk. It startled me to imagine him in a passionate affair with another woman. Did he not show his wife affection now because his love still lay elsewhere? Did he not smile or talk warmly to anyone because he had chosen a life he no longer wanted? I’ve forgotten many specifics in the letter, but one sentence has always stayed with me. You might understand, he wrote, if you can imagine a drowning man suddenly feeling thirst and then having that thirst quenched.

Your grandaunt was just as quiet a person, though more outwardly kind and curious about others. Perhaps you disagree. She must have forgiven him, I suppose, though I’m not sure what that required of her. Did she have to decide that he had not wronged her, or did she have to accept that he had and so choose to live with it? The only true way to forgive someone, it seems to me, is to forget what they have done to you and, in turn, forget them. Whether that is possible is another question.

When I heard the front door open, I quickly returned all the boxes to the shelf and came out to greet everyone. You had all gone to buy the Christmas tree, which your granduncle was now carrying into the living room as you and your cousins beamed with enthusiasm around him.

As he set up the tree and you and your cousins began decorating it, your grandaunt made tea and brought him a cup. Before handing it to him, she blew into it several times. He took it from her and nodded, and amid the laughter of all the children he watched her walk back to the kitchen, and I saw in his eyes a mixture of love and endless sadness.

He was only forty-five years old at the time, still very much a young man, your father’s youngest uncle, a man I had never known and would never truly know beyond a confession he had once written to his wife.

It was then that you finally acknowledged me. You had my red knapsack in your hands and you handed it to me. You had been using it as a book bag for school. My mother bought me that knap sack when I was sixteen, the only gift of hers I took with me when we left Vietnam. It had grown worn over the years, the edges frayed, the red canvas faded after all that time in the tropical sun, dragged through sand, soaked in rainwater and seawater as it held everything you and I owned in the world.

You said, Auntie bought me a new bag today, and you gave it back to me as though returning something broken, and then rejoined your cousins at the Christmas tree where your face lit up and you yelped with laughter.

At the bus stop, my normal bus came and went. The rain intensified. When cars thrashed past me on the watery streets and I closed my eyes, I heard the ocean.

As the downtown bus arrived, I thought I might begin crying, but all I felt as I mounted the steps was my breath quickening, a wave of oxygen and exhilaration, what a deep-sea diver must feel when he comes back up to the sunlight and the air.