Chapter 8
“He’s got a lot to say, doesn’t he? So many feelings.”
Calla was reading over Vivi’s shoulder as they rode in the clanky elevator up to the third floor of Sunshine Suites, a motel
“Samuel is entitled to feelings.”
“So will you leave him hanging again?”
“I still don’t know what to say.”
“I’ve never considered it,” Calla mused. “Having to explain yourself to another person. There was none of that with Wayland.
From practically the first time he came around, he knew everything about us. Do you ever think how strange it was that you—guarded
little Vivi—let someone in so fully?”
“Hard to hide anything from him when he lived next door.”
“Sure. But that’s not it, not all of it. We had other neighbors.”
“None like Way.”
“Sometimes I forget that you met him first. You tried to keep him from me, remember?”
It’d been a choked-breath sort of summer, humid and itchy with anticipation.
The second-warmest on record in Deer Creek.
Vivi had been stripped down to her swimsuit, reading in the shade of the woods, when she heard a yelp of pain.
Wayland Howard, the new neighbor boy, had fallen off his bike after attempting to squeeze between two pines behind their houses.
He’d scraped up his forehead, sprained his ankle.
She helped him limp back to the enormous blue colonial with the snow-white shutters, eyeing him from underneath her lashes as he spoke a mile a minute about his interests—filmmaking and photography, Green Day and Stephen King.
There were no awkward conversational pauses.
He flowed like a stream from one thought to the next.
Vivi had marveled at his lack of self-consciousness.
At thirteen—six months younger than Vivi—Wayland wasn’t nearly as striking as he came to be in his later years. His mouth
was slightly too large for his face, his haircut choppy around his ears. He had a nervous habit of scattering his gaze, but
when he spoke, charisma shone from him, as palpable as lines of heat rising from asphalt. She liked him immediately, despite
or because of the false bravado he tried to summon as he winced beside her. It’d been easy for her to become his confidant;
the person with whom he shared his nascent ambitions and creative frustrations. To her, he was a beacon of all that could
be.
That summer, the two of them became best friends. Then Calla inserted herself in their pair and they were a trio, inseparable
from one another. He’d been patient with Calla because she belonged to Vivi, and he was loyal to all things Vivi. But, somewhere
along the way, the orbits shifted. No one knew who belonged to whom.
“I didn’t keep Way from you. I wanted something for myself.”
“And you had it, didn’t you?” Calla’s words were spiky, but her tone was subdued. “You and Wayland both.”
Slowly, after a tense draw of breath, Vivi asked, “Is there something you want to say?”
It’d be a horror and relief to talk about what happened after Enmeshment. To discover what exactly Calla knew. Then the elevator bell dinged and the sisters stepped through to a hallway with a bulb
that flickered, like a lighthouse’s warning signal.
“If I have something to say, I’ll send you an email. That’s how it’s done, right?”
“Calla, stop. Are you mad at me because of Wayland?”
Vivi’s question was just loose enough to contain any number of meanings. Was Calla mad because Vivi took Way’s side during
their final argument? Was she mad because Wayland harbored a fidelity to the teenage Vivi, still regarding her with the rosy
awe of first love? Or was Calla simply annoyed that she would always be the latecomer to their trio, the one perpetually racing
to catch up? Whatever interpretation Calla landed on would be the one Vivi would run with.
Vivi watched Calla weighing these possibilities. It looked, for a moment, as if they’d have it out right there in the dirty
hallway. Then her shoulders dropped and she exhaled loudly. Calla seemed older than her years. She resembled May, picking
up the broken dishes after an argument with their father, knowing she’d have to do it all over again the next day.
“I’m not mad,” Calla said finally. “What would I have to be mad about, Vivi?”
Her words hung between them. Theirs was a game of chicken that Vivi could not win. Calla peered at her with a mix of weariness
and disappointment and reluctant empathy, and then, after Vivi dropped her gaze, said, “That’s what I thought. You go ahead.
I’ll catch up in a moment.”
The inaptly named Sunshine Suites was the only hotel within a reasonable distance of Rathmore. The rundown building catered
to parents stopping in for move-in weekends and academics flying in for interviews. Because of the hotel’s prime location
and its utter dearth of competitors, its owners harbored no ambition toward reasonable maintenance, and in fact seemed to
take unholy glee from the building’s slow dissolution.
Within the stucco walls, there were only the barest of amenities; a workout space that included a set of barbells worn with sweat; a hot tub that hadn’t worked since the days of Reagan.
Over the years Sunshine Suites had become a sort of itinerant space, where hotel cleaners would loan out key cards to friends and lovers.
Half the rooms reeked of pot. The other half were ravaged with some musty bodily funk that could never quite be scrubbed out of the carpet fibers.
If May hadn’t disappeared in the night, she and Tu?n might have stayed there with the other Rathmore parents, waking early for the droning campus tours, treating the sisters
to lunch at the one Chinese restaurant in town. May could have helped Vivi choose the drapes for her dorm. She might have
been able to meet Vivi’s mentors at the college. They’d have borne, as a family, the lukewarm coffee in the motel lobby and
the all-too-believable threat of bedbugs within the ancient mattresses. But instead, the sisters watched their friends hosting
their own parents with mixtures of pride and embarrassment, trying to convince themselves that they were glad to be spared
the bother.
In the room Vivi paid for, there were two full-sized beds crammed in a space that hadn’t been updated since the days when
Tuscan farmhouse decor doubled as the aesthetic signifier for worldly romance. A birdshit-streaked balconette overlooked a
barren parking lot.
Vivi adjusted the temperature settings on the thermostat and flipped the comforters back from the beds. May had never let
them touch comforters in hotel rooms; she said they were seldom washed, as filthy as anything in the woods behind their house.
Soon Calla swept in, dumping an armful of packages onto the coffee table. Chips with a radioactive coating of cheese-adjacent
dust, cardboard cookies that hurt your teeth when you bit into them. Rainbow-colored power drinks that were, somehow, more
depressing for their vibrant hues.
“Dinner,” she announced, tearing into a bag of gummy bears.
“That junk will rot your teeth.”
Calla tossed a bag of chips at her head. “You’re welcome, you lout.”
On her bed, Vivi had spread articles and open books around her, forming a moat of secondary sources. The ink was faded and
the low lights made it difficult to read, but she pressed on, circling a phrase here; underlining another there.
On the opposite bed, Calla was crunching loudly, teeth flashing as she spoke. “Here’s what I think. Ly was madly in love with one of our ancestors. Who wouldn’t be? The Nguy?n women are incontrovertibly hot. Maybe she was some childhood love of his that he couldn’t forget. He couldn’t help paying
homage to her in the painting. But it was a secret—a Romeo and Juliet situation? Maybe she was already married?—and so he
painted over Blue Mirror. Kept the affair hidden to the last. Then he mailed that letter that you gave away—”
“Negotiated away.”
“—to his ladylove. Because there was something else he was holding for her. A fortune! Jewels? A trove of paintings?”
“But what about the other woman in Blue Mirror? The white one with curly hair?”
“Who knows. Who cares!” Calla threw the plastic bag in the trash, missed, and flopped back onto a pillow without picking it
up. “First we need to figure out which ancestor Ly was madly in love with.”
Vivi tongued her canine tooth, a thinking habit she’d held since she was a kid. “The letter was written in 1945, which would
have been five years after Dad was born. So, if your romantic theory holds water, Ly could have meant the letter for our grandmother. But since Blue Mirror was likely painted in the 1930s, it might have been more plausible that our great-grandmother was the subject. What was her
name?”
“I can’t remember. Starts with a T? Or a D? Duyên or Tiên or something. Vietnamese names are hard for me, those guttural sounds.
After we started talking again, Dad told me some rambling story about our great-grandmother. But I was stoned at the time—”
“You were high?”
“Pot doesn’t count. Anyway, I was stoned and I wasn’t really listening. It’ll come to me eventually.”
“Did she have a freckle below her eye?”
“How should I know? I never paid attention to any of that.”
Vivi thought of the shrine in their kitchen in Deer Creek, one she and Calla largely ignored, because what were these ancestors to them?
Outside their disjointed quartet, the sisters had never met any other family members; most were dead, some simply lost in the world, addresses and fates unknown.
By the time the sisters were born, all they had to claim were grim faces staring out in palpable disappointment from yellowing photographs.
Under those unsmiling visages, Tu?n tried to teach them Vietnamese, hammering the phonetics into their skulls with militaristic rigor.
Now that your mother is gone— He stumbled over the word: gone, not left.
As if her disappearance hadn’t been a choice.
In the moment, his silence carved an unfillable space into the air
between them.