Chapter 22
That night, Vivi dreamed about diving into Lake Michigan. Only, the moment she sank underwater, the lake’s surface hardened
above her into a thick layer of ice that she couldn’t break, no matter how forcefully she pounded at it. Freezing water flooded
her nose, her eye sockets bulged. Everything was wet and burning at the same time. She would not survive. It would all be
for nothing. Then, just before she let herself fall away into the surge of blue, a woman’s voice pushed through her consciousness.
Wake up, beloved.
Quickly now.
Time is peeling away.
“I keep telling you that you shouldn’t sleep like that. It’ll screw with your neck.”
Behind her on the bed, Calla stretched her arms to the ceiling like a tall, white lily. Sleep had made her cheeks rosy, healthful.
Vivi imagined folding Calla up into an origami swan, sliding her in her pocket. With each passing moment, she felt an untraceable
dread, wondering if it was the last time she’d see her sister. Calla, in this form, was one she wanted to keep. Who knew which
Calla might show up next time?
Vivi rifled in her suitcase for fresh clothes.
“Can I borrow your toothbrush?” Calla asked. She pushed from the bed and vaulted past Vivi, jamming her elbow into Vivi’s hip as she raced for the bathroom.
“Ow.”
Calla rolled her eyes. “I barely grazed you.”
Minutes later, she emerged with Vivi’s toothbrush dangling from her mouth, foamy toothpaste dribbling down her chin. After
Calla was done, she pushed Vivi’s laptop toward her.
“We’re going to book a car,” she said. “The bus will take too long, and we haven’t seen Viet Nam. We can’t let this opportunity pass us by—traveling together, finally! The way we always wanted.”
“Sure. That’s a good idea.”
“Maybe after Long Xuyên, we should go to Cam Ranh. Mom’s relatives will be there.”
“The assholes who didn’t bother to tell us she died?”
“You can yell at them in person. Aren’t you curious?”
Vivi was. But she also understood that this period of wandering wasn’t sustainable. Once they found the offering—if they found
it—there’d be consequences to face. Vivi’s savings were nearly depleted. She needed to find another job. They had to decide
what to do about the farmhouse in Deer Creek. But Calla wasn’t interested in the drear of practicalities. She would do what
she’d always done. Take on odd jobs, wheedle her way into adventures, live day to day with the desperation that chased her,
confident that the world would take care of her.
“We can’t keep jumping from place to place for the rest of our lives.”
“Why not, when it sounds so fun?”
“Why do you keep running? From your life? From me?”
Calla turned, incredulous, so she could peer into Vivi’s face. “I’m not running away from you, you self-absorbed nitwit.”
“I’m the self-absorbed one.”
Calla ignored this. “I’m running because I love to run.
You know this. It’s always been in me, this need to fly.
Now that I’m sober, released from Wayland and his impossible expectations, the color is back in the world.
It’s a Kandinsky, a Hockney. There are so many brushstrokes to follow; I’m going to chase them all. ”
“Until you collapse?”
“Running isn’t a symptom of my addiction. Running is what makes me me.”
Vivi considered this. What was essential and immutable in a person? Was it the way they spoke or the choices they made or
the way they drank their coffee? Could Calla be Calla without the pain of the past, the questions that drove her to run? Vivi
had a sense of kaleidoscopic turning.
In a small voice, she asked, “What happens to me whenever you disappear?”
Calla gave her a look that was part sympathy and part exasperation. “You stay, Bee. You stay and you live your life. That’s
what you always wanted. You see it, don’t you? You’re meant to have a family. Not the kind we had. Not like the Ingalls either.
A noisy, happy, imperfect, boring family. But you’re running too, just in a different way. I run toward what I want; you run
away from it.”
“Maybe I don’t know how to stay.”
“Sure you do. You’ve never left me. Just do that for yourself this time.”
An hour later, the sisters were strapped into the back of a rust-colored sedan that had seen better days. It smelled of fried
scallions and wet dog and the sort of sticky sweat that pools in the creases of your skin after languishing afternoons. An
advertisement for a hair salon was taped to the cracking leather of the back seat: The New You Is Waiting. Vivi and Calla rolled down the windows and coughed out the residue of the previous passengers.
For the first few miles, their driver, Ted, spent more time honking than pushing the gas pedal, weaving through the streets with stomach-roiling jerks and sudden brakes that jammed the sisters against each other, like Lincoln Logs in a bucket.
He leaned back every few minutes to shoot them a grin meant to be reassuring.
His well-groomed mustache fell at the ends, like the arms of a defeated general.
He dangled a toothpick from his lips, speaking softly through his earbuds to what appeared to be a very disgruntled lover.
His coaxing—alternately fervent and defiant—became the soundtrack of the three-and-a-half-hour ride.
Calla was easily distracted by the scenery, pointing at cyclists with towering baskets of fruit and flowers. While they were
stopped in traffic, she leaned out a window and bought them skewers of grilled beef. The lemongrass stuck in their teeth and
the oil from the meat slicked against their lips. Food tasted better here, it was a fact. Vivi laughed as Calla reached through
the window again, this time fluttering a bill toward the peanut seller, who was only too glad to oblige with a paper sack
of boiled nuts.
“I like to hear you laughing. Are you happy?” Calla asked. She squeezed a fleshy peanut from its shell into Vivi’s outstretched
hand.
“I am.” She found that it was true. Her conversation with Calla had eased the weight of her mother’s words. Keep close to your sister. Not entirely, but by a little, the vise was loosening. “Are you?”
“The happiest. This country is magic. I never want to leave. Maybe I won’t.”
Vivi worked past the needle in her gut, not wanting to dwell on the future yet. “What do you think the offering is?”
“It has to be a piece of art. Right?”
“A hidden Ly painting. Would it belong to us?”
“Who else could claim it?”
Vivi’s excitement grew. If they did find the offering, it would change the entire course of art scholarship and her own professional
prospects. There would be new articles, a resurgence of interest in the Vietnamese French painter. The art community would
finally celebrate Tam’s courage and mourn her love story.
And Tam would be free, no longer living in the shadow of an assumed identity. But did Tam want that version of freedom?
Vivi drowned a flash of misgiving, not as an art scholar, but as an ancestor. What if Tam herself would have chosen to remain hidden, so that her art could exist without the influence of her biography? But contexts
had changed since she’d died; minds were opened, laws changed. Surely, her secret couldn’t—shouldn’t—hold, so many generations
later.
What did we owe to the men and women who came before us? The protection of silence or the cold and uncertain arena of public
judgment? How could any person make that decision for another? When so many hands could lay claim to a story, who did that
story ultimately belong to?
Calla gestured out the window. The peanut shells in her lap scattered onto the floor of the car. “Oh, Bee, look.”
They’d left the bedlam of the city behind, and, like the abrupt and cleansing silence in the aftermath of a storm, all became
quiet in the car. Without the traffic, they were flying at high speed, airborne almost. The road took them west into the Mekong
Delta, past canals and winding riverways studded with floating villages, past flat green fields and corridors of banana trees.
The beauty—uncompromising and stalwart, even after centuries of turmoil—swarmed against them in a rush.
“I can’t believe—” Vivi stopped, not knowing how to finish the sentence.
I can’t believe we are finally here together.
I can’t believe I waited so long to come.
“I know,” Calla said, throwing an arm around Vivi’s shoulders, hauling her close. “I know!”