Interstitial
Em Ki`êu,
Do you remember chasing the hens in the yard? Even though Má told me not to, I used to think of them as pets. Your favorites
were the tawny ones with their scraggly feathers, their impudent manners. I loved the old black hen, M?c. She was regal but mean; a real shit-giver. The day Ba slaughtered her, I cried for hours. You were napping, so you missed
it all. The fall of his ax, the dull break of neckbones. He was furious that I was wasting tears on M?c. You are too old for this, he said. He forced me to pluck her myself. Afterward, I washed her bloodied feathers, then took them to our hiding place
at the Old House near the ravine.
Sometimes I think this is the first moment when I learned cruelty. Ba would have called it survival. In a country with a past
as violent as ours, the difference between the two can feel hair-thin.
These days, I start each morning with a memory. It’s as natural to me as clearing the phlegm before I speak. Is that what
happens when we’re closer to the end than the beginning? This should depress me. But it also feels right that we must dwell
in the lands we have built.
I received a call yesterday from an unknown number. I almost didn’t pick up. Even these decades later, my hand shakes when
the phone rings. Each time, I wonder if it’s her. In my fantasies, we’re young again. She’s asking me what brand of cigarettes
I want from the store, pushing Calla in the shopping cart as Vivian and I wait back at the house watching Rocky and Bullwinkle,
this stupid American cartoon that Vivian couldn’t get enough of. I see May closing the car door with her hip, tucking that
lock of hair back into her bun, driving down the country road back to us. Only to you can I admit this foolishness.
But it wasn’t her on the line. It was a distant cousin of hers, one still living in Cam Ranh.
This cousin had recently suffered a deathbed crisis of conscience.
She wanted to unburden herself. She said that May had been intending for months to return to Viet Nam.
Not forever, but long enough for her to regather herself.
That’s how the cousin put it—like May was a blanket that’d
unraveled. This happened the year she disappeared. That night, May went to the airport with her passport. She was going to
call me when she’d arrived back in Cam Ranh, when it was too late for me to stop her. Maybe she did call and we didn’t answer.
Who knows? I never heard from her.
The cousin told me that May had hardly made it a week in Cam Ranh before she changed her mind. She missed her daughters and,
in a lesser way, me. She wanted to return to Deer Creek and make things right again. Her family was adamantly against this.
They reminded her that I was an old man, a drunken slug of a human who’d shrivel up the last of her youth. They encouraged
her to send for her daughters and raise them in Viet Nam, far from the excesses of that godless country. She didn’t listen. She was going home to us. But, on the way to Tan Son
Nh?t, there was an accident with a motorist. Her car flipped over into a dyke. May died immediately.
The family, collectively, made the decision not to tell me and my daughters what had happened. It’d be a mercy, they said,
to be spared the horrors of her death. Plus, they didn’t know how to reach me. (They could have, of course, figured it out,
as the cousin later did, but they wanted to wash their hands of me and mourn their beloved May without the taint of her disastrous
marriage.) Almost a quarter of a century, they kept the silence. Decades, her people let us believe that May was still alive
and evading us. Cruelty, again; cruelty, always.
Em, you can imagine that my first impulse would have been to grasp for my faithful companion, anger.
But I didn’t rage. I thanked the cousin and set down the phone.
There simply isn’t time to waste on blame.
Instead, I’ll find a way to see both of my daughters and to tell them everything I know.
Not just about their mother. About all the things I’ve fought to hide from them, including our grandmother Tam and our troubled roots. My girls deserve this, and more.
Our family seems thrown upon a galaxy of secrets. We exist light-years from one another. But there must be a time when space
contracts, when the universe becomes as small as a pinprick, and we are all together again. That’s what I dream that heaven
is like.
Until we next meet—
Anh Tu?n