Chapter 21 #2
to the galleries and tried to deface one of our Qi Baishis with a can of spray paint. It was supposed to be some statement
about the deification of artists, who knows, but thank God he didn’t succeed. I was so pissed. I’d spent hours restoring that
painting. But Samuel wouldn’t let the Forster press charges. The kid was only twenty, living under the poverty line. But full
of desire and talent. Sam ended up meeting up with him, then buying one of his paintings for his private collection. They
still have coffee from time to time.”
“That’s saint-level forgiveness.”
“That’s Samuel Noi. He always said that part of being human is understanding how much greatness we’re capable of. Great evil. Great beauty. It took me a long time to see the world as he does. I still don’t, not really. Or I don’t trust that vision, maybe.”
“You see things in black and white. And he shows you all the shades in between.”
“Yes. That’s it.”
“You’ve always seen all the shades of me, though.”
“I don’t know if that’s true, Bee.”
Calla scooped up a few blood cubes and dropped them into Vivi’s bowl, because Vivi enjoyed them and she did not. “I liked
Samuel. I did. He kept finding little ways to take care of you; filling your water glass, cutting you the best portion of
his steak. It was weird, but nice, really nice, seeing you get nurtured for a change. And he was cute, in that nerdy way you
like.”
“So why were you and Wayland so cold to him?”
“We were jealous. Obviously. For different reasons. Wayland would be jealous of anyone you took seriously. I was jealous that
you, once again, found someone to love you so purely and completely. I’m not proud of it.”
“Wayland loved you.”
“Sometimes, he did,” Calla agreed. “And sometimes he hated me. Complicated things, all at once, right?”
“You miss him?”
“Yeah, I do.”
They left the market and walked toward the S?ng Sài Gòn. Ships crossed the river slowly, leaving radiating gills of water in their wake. Vivi saw a couple ahead of them on the path,
the woman toting what looked to be an iridescent balloon on a stick. It floated like a blue nimbus.
“What will you do about Samuel?” Calla asked. She carried a dragon fruit sinh t? from a street stall, slurping at it with big swallows. Vivi was happy to see her sister’s hunger returning. The hollows in
her cheeks were slightly more filled out, slicing years off her appearance.
“I started writing him a letter when we arrived in Viet Nam,” Vivi admitted. “On my laptop. I was trying to explain it all. Us, Dad, the painting. What it meant to glimpse myself in this century-old piece of art. I thought if I could find the right words, he’d forgive me.”
“Wouldn’t he?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t sent it. I probably won’t.”
“What I said about marriage and partnership, before.” Calla gave her a sidelong glance. “It’s not for me. But it doesn’t mean
that it wouldn’t be for you.”
“It could have been for you,” Vivi said, a strain of blame in her voice. “You and Wayland.”
Calla threw the rest of her sinh t? into the trash with a loud clank. “Damn it, Vivi, I can’t live my life for you.”
“You can’t live your life for me,” Vivi repeated. “Calla. I have never lived my life for anyone but you.”
There had to have been a time before Calla, but Vivi couldn’t excavate that far back in her memory. Still, she tried to imagine
it. Her as an unsistered toddler, ambling on pigeon toes through the farmhouse. Reaching for the bobbing tassels on the tablecloth.
Nestling her nose into the animal warmth of May and Tu?n, whose stubble sandpapered against her forehead.
Maybe that time, the Calla-less breach, would have been lighter and less burdened. Or maybe it’d simply been lonelier.
The indigo river glimmered with lights from the cruise boats and skyscrapers, a cloudy mirror held up to the city’s many extravagances.
“No one asked you to do that.”
“No?” Vivi had never revealed May’s last words to Calla, intuiting on some level that it would cheapen Vivi’s years of caretaking.
She worried that Calla would feel like a burden. For all the things they had cause to doubt, she never wanted Calla to doubt
her.
Calla was yawning, bored of this now-familiar argument. “It’s too late to get into it with you.”
Vivi hailed a cab and slid in next to her sister.
After only a minute, Calla’s head was on Vivi’s shoulder and she was snoring lightly.
Vivi breathed in the scent of orange groves and something deeper, a miasma of her sister’s mortality.
She wished she had a potion to keep Calla sleeping, like Briar Rose in her uninterrupted night.
But soon enough, Calla would be awake, her mind running loops through time and space, and Vivi would be again tasked with holding Calla against her will as she struggled toward a destiny that had nothing at all to do with Vivi.
At the hotel, Calla collapsed as soon as the door shut, boneless and still. It was as if she’d been waiting to let down her
guard. Vivi pulled a blanket over and around her, tucking in the edges. One of Calla’s legs slid off the side of the bed,
where it rambled in aimless pirouettes.
Vivi was tired too, but she didn’t feel ready for sleep. She opened her laptop and continued working on her letter to Samuel.
She tweaked each sentence mercilessly, until her fingers stilled and she finally rested her head on the desk, spent of emotion
and no less certain of what she had to say. There were no sufficient words, after all, for the pain that humans caused one
another.
To: Samuel Noi [samnoi@]
From: Vivian Nguy?n [v_nguyen@]
Subject: Re: the perils of rationalizing [DRAFT]
Samuel,
The first thing is: I want you to know how sorry I am. I cherish your words, even the ones that hurt. You are the person I
most admire and should have held closer. Your integrity is one of the things I love about you. I shouldn’t have put you in
a position that threatened it. You did nothing wrong, neither you nor Phoebe. It was all me.
You asked if the risk was worth it. I don’t know how to answer that. I regret the way I left you. But I’ve also uncovered
more than I’d ever hoped about myself and my past. I want you to know everything about me. Not because I think you could forgive
me, but because you are the only person who ever saw me, despite how much I hid from you. I owe you my story.
I’ll start it the way I know best, as a warped little fairy tale.
Once upon a time, near the hem of the woods in Wisconsin, in a yellow farmhouse that often seemed as remote as a forgotten
palace under the sea, lived two sisters who believed they would only ever have each other . . .