Chapter 25
Out at the back of the house, Ki`êu wheeled himself down the ramp, shrugging off Vivi’s offers of assistance. The bridge in front of them led across a dry, shallow
gulch and into an uncleared thicket. Her uncle’s chair caught at the planks, but he pushed it along, stronger than his age
might suggest.
Even though he was the younger brother, Ki`êu seemed much older than her father. But it made sense. Vivi hadn’t seen Tu?n for years, since Calla’s wedding, so her image of him had frozen in time. The body she’d gazed upon in the coffin—clad in
a pressed suit; signet ring on his pinky finger; a weird rictus grimace on his face—had been that of a stranger.
Vivi handed Ki`êu the unsent letter from her father, the one that had led the sisters to Long Xuyên. “A delivery from beyond the grave.”
As he read, he blinked hard, as if clearing dust specks from his eyes. “After all this time. Your mother didn’t leave you.”
“She did,” Vivi corrected ferociously, brushing a lone, irksome tear from her eye. “She might have tried to return, but she still
left. Like him.”
For a few beats, Ki`êu regarded her in sympathetic silence. Then he said, so quietly she had to stoop to hear him, “You think your father meant
to get in the accident?”
“I don’t know what I think. How did you find out that he’d died?”
“His lawyer wrote us. Tu?n had left me a bit of money. I haven’t touched it. Everything that counted, the house and the land, went to you girls.”
Vivi had disregarded the lawyer’s messages. She didn’t want anything from her father. And Calla, in her haste, would have
signed whatever documents she was supposed to, then forgotten about the whole thing. Maybe they’d have known about their uncle
sooner, had they done things differently.
“I miss him,” Ki`êu said. He rubbed at the face of his watch, as if trying to jitter time. “And I don’t believe he killed himself. The Tu?n I knew wouldn’t have quit life like that. Especially not with you two to live for.”
Vivi ignored the spasm in her chest. “What do you remember about him?”
“What don’t I remember? He was my knight, my samurai. As he’d say: a real shit-giver. He’d throw off the bigger boys when
they came after me. He had a sense of justice, you know; too rigid often, but fearsome nonetheless.” Vivi remembered her father’s
wink at Halloween when she’d pushed the bully onto the pavement. Morality and love, both so twisted in Tu?n. “He was also an adventurer, anxious to experience everything he could, like there was a ticking clock at his back. How fast
he sped on the motorbike—I thought I’d die half a dozen times as his passenger.”
“Every cop in a fifty-mile radius knew his truck by sight. Calla is the same.”
“I can see that.” Ki`êu laughed, a gravelly and comforting sound that Vivi leaned toward. “Once, when he was a teenager, your father stole our neighbor’s
brand-new motorbike. This was in the fifties; not many of us had them yet. But we couldn’t get enough of the speed, him especially.
He had more confidence than aptitude back then, so you can guess what happened next. That very day, he drove the motorbike
straight into a pit by the canal. Such filth. The bike was wrecked, of course, and we had to walk for miles in sodden clothing.
The walloping our father gave us! We worked for months to pay the neighbor back, then, as soon as we did, Tu?n tried to convince me to go steal another bike.”
Vivi gave a short, amused huff. “Head like a rock, brain like mud. Our mother said that about him when she was annoyed.”
“Each time I tried to get angry at your father, he’d shine that bright smile on me—so like your sister’s, actually—and I’d
have to relent. After all, he made it feel inevitable that we’d be just fine.”
“Were you?”
“Sometimes. And sometimes we weren’t. But who doesn’t need that illusion of safety? Was my brother such a capable charmer
in America?”
Vivi thought of Tu?n’s rapid decline after May left, how he slumped over the bills at the kitchen table, a flush collaring his neck as he added numbers that never
seemed to match up. His painful, almost savage squirm at parent-teacher conferences and the way he cursed out other drivers
at the slightest traffic infractions. No, he wasn’t a charmer, and he wasn’t very capable either.
Maybe that had been the appeal of the shed. There, he could travel back to the roads of his youth, speeding toward a future
that hadn’t yet been etched in granite. Dreaming of alternate realities as Vivi sat in her bedroom, doing the very same thing.
“My father had demons,” she said finally.
“You mean his anger? I saw it. He’d get in terrible fights sometimes. Especially when he drank. Everyone knew to steer clear
of him in those moments.”
“We did too.”
“After I got married, my wife forbade alcohol in our home. That seemed to help. You’re right to say that Tu?n had a darkness in him. He covered it with bravado, but no one could deny it, not even those who most adored him. Some humans
come with a price. You accept them in their entirety, because learning to love their flaws is easier than not loving them
at all.”
“I wish I’d met the man you knew.”
Ki`êu was silent for so long that Vivi thought he wouldn’t answer.
Then he said, “We’re different people to our children than to others in our lives.
The barrier of personal responsibility can stand between fathers and their children.
For some, it’s insurmountable. I’m sure Khánh will one day approach others with questions she might have asked me.
She’ll wonder if she ever knew me, too.”
“Wouldn’t you rather give her the answers yourself?”
“What if I’m unable to give her the answers she needs?” He fell into a coughing fit, then held up his hand as Vivi reached
to help him. After a moment, he continued. “Maybe there’s another truth I can offer you.”
The sunlight glinted off the steel encasing Ki`êu’s wheelchair. His hands rested on his knees, wrinkles crisscrossing like wires of knowledge. How many years did her uncle—any
of them—have left?
At that moment, Vivi thought of metempsychosis, the transference of souls. Would it be possible for her parents, those damaged
and beaten souls, to start again in another life? And if they did, would they bring the old pain with them, or would they
finally be able to lay it down?
“I want to know everything. My father never talked about you. Any of you. We assumed you were dead.”
He sighed. “I wondered. Over the years, I’ve thought of you all often, especially after your father’s death. He didn’t want
us to write you.”
“Why would he hide you?”
“Why does anyone harbor a secret? Shame. Protection. He blamed himself for this.” Ki`êu gestured down at his legs. “I’ll tell you what I remember.”
Before her father’s accident at the lumber mill, there had been another.
When Tu?n was sixteen and Ki`êu was eleven, they decided to run back to the abandoned family home by the ravine.
The Old House, they called it. It was largely uninhabitable, but they liked to explore the property for odds and ends.
A decade before, a foreigner had come to live there, and the boys were still digging up things she left behind after her death.
They liked to pore over her cache of belongings, making up stories about her life.
It was their secret kingdom where beatings were verboten, where laughter was plentiful and unabashed.
That day was clear and fine, with a springtime breeze that coaxed them from the Old House to the yard beyond.
Tu?n called for a game of hide-and-seek.
Ki`êu remembered that Tu?n had been in a mood that afternoon.
Their father had antagonized him and Tu?n was tense with resentment, so when he took off to hide, it was with a thundercloud over his head.
Ki`êu looked everywhere for his brother—in the trees, behind boulders, within the wreckage of the house. Evening had almost fallen
and Ki`êu, still timid and a little afraid, called out for Tu?n again and again. Said he was giving up. He wanted to go home. But hours passed and Tu?n never came.
Eventually, the moon rose and the night creatures began to stir. The fine day turned into an ominous night. Ki`êu sobbed, frightened in earnest now, not caring if his brother jeered at him. They were alone and their parents would not know
where to find them. No one would.
Then came a laugh, Tu?n’s laugh. Tr?n tìm, em. Ki`êu ran toward the sound of his brother’s voice, which had begun to grow fainter. The woods were dark. Ki`êu tripped on his own feet. He could hear the rushing of the river as he approached the spot where the soil began to curve steeply
down into the ravine. His brother’s voice was so clear, so close, thorned with impatience now.
Tr?n tìm!
In his haste to avoid Tu?n’s irritation, Ki`êu raced ahead. His foot slipped on a patch of weeds. He went barreling down the ravine. Seconds later, he landed almost twenty
feet below, his spine hitting the sharp jut of rock in exactly the spot that would sever the use of his legs for the rest
of his life. The last thing Ki`êu saw was a spiraling shadow high above him. He imagined it to be a great, winged creature come to escort him home.
“Over sixty years and I’ll never forget my brother’s face when I woke in the hospital.
It was so pale, lifeless. You’d think he was the one who’d fallen.
He refused to leave my bedside. It took years before he would return to the Old House, and even then, he would not linger.
We’d both had our lives ripped away that day. ”
“You were just a child.”
“So was he.”
“You’re not angry at him?”
“I was. Of course. But he’s spent a lifetime repenting for it. There was never such a devoted brother. He helped me build
a new life and, when I married Linh, he gave me money for our house. And after all, it was an accident, what happened at the
ravine. How can I explain forgiveness between siblings? You have a sister. You know. The separation between selves isn’t so
firm. The grudges crumble under the weight of the love.”