Chapter 26
The following afternoon, Khánh and Canadian Evan married in a tall-towered cathedral at the center of town. They were earnest in their vows; hands shaking,
eyes lowered. Their families gathered in a tight circle around them, as if to say: For them, you’ll have to fight your way through us. It wasn’t just a ritual for witnesses, but one for protection, as if the might of community could forestall future peril.
A wonderful fib we tell ourselves, but Vivi found herself fighting the prickle of tears anyway.
She snuck a look at her sister. Was Calla thinking of her own wedding at that moment? Snowflakes strung from glass ceilings,
monogrammed napkins, sheepskin rugs. If she did, she never said it. She only beamed.
“Those two will make it,” she said.
Calla took Vivi’s arm as they strolled to the banquet hall where the reception would be held. The heat was particularly sharp
that day and Vivi fidgeted against the fabric of her borrowed áo dài. She tried to loosen the mandarin collar, but her fingers were slick with sweat. Calla reached over and did it for her.
“I like this color on you,” she said.
Marigold, like the eyes of Ly’s creatures.
Calla wore cornflower blue. All morning, Vivi had been uncomfortable in her own skin.
She woke with a rasp in her throat, a migraine drumming into her temples.
She dry-heaved into the toilet, trying to mask the sounds by repeatedly flushing.
Maybe she shouldn’t have drunk the tap water at the hotel in Ho Chi Minh City.
She’d forgotten that she did not possess her sister’s iron stomach.
When she looked at herself in the mirror, she saw a wan copy of the reflection that usually greeted her.
Calla, maddeningly, remained fresh as ever. Viet Nam agreed with her.
Vivi’s attention turned to her antler ring, which had been cutting off her circulation as her fingers swelled in the heat.
She struggled to pull it past her knuckle, then tried to slip it into her purse without drawing Calla’s notice, but Calla
caught the glint of silver.
“That ring doesn’t even fit you anymore,” Calla said. She wrenched it from Vivi’s hand and threw it into the dirt. “Just give
it up already.”
“What the hell.” Vivi retrieved the ring and put it in her pocket. “It’s Mom’s. It’s ours.”
“I should never have taken it from you.”
“We agreed to share it.”
Calla ignored her sister. “Not that you put up a fight. If I’d asked you for the skin off your back, you would have given
it to me. You were born with such guilt. Apologizing for yourself. Wanting to be so good. Who did that to you?”
Something in her sister’s words hit at the quick. “I don’t want to be therapized right now.”
“You’ve always been afraid to stay. Afraid to leave. Indecisive whenever it came to your own needs.”
“Why are you picking a fight, Calla?”
The air was too thick. The scent of fried food, oily and pungent in the swelter, made Vivi nauseous. Calla’s expression turned
guilty.
“I read the draft of the email you wrote to Samuel last night.”
“You went into my email?”
“Your passwords have been the same for the past twenty years. Cybersecurity experts would have a field day with you. I read
it because you’ve been so—sad lately, so unsure of yourself. I wanted to know why you were walking away from him.”
“Because you showed up with a goddamn letter and sketch from Dad’s shed! Because you asked me to follow you on this wild chase!”
“No one was forcing you to choose between us.” Calla paused, a twinge of uncharacteristic nervousness skittering through her
defiance. “Anyway. I, um, I sent the email.”
“You didn’t.” Vivi wanted to smack her. She wanted to shake her until her teeth rattled. What had she said in that email?
Too much. She saw now that she wasn’t really intending for Samuel to ever read it. Her words were too raw, bloated with confessions
she’d have died to utter aloud.
“Someone had to do it. You would have sat on that email forever, until he forgot about you. I was doing you a favor.”
“That’s so fucked up. You’re so fucked up.”
“I’d rather be a fuck-up than a coward who hides from my own desires. Like one of those deer that gets spooked by their own
shadow.” Calla’s voice softened. “Tell me: why did you stop painting? When we were kids?”
“Don’t change the topic.” Vivi began to walk away. “That was a terrible thing to do. A betrayal of trust.”
“That’s right, tuck tail and run.” Calla followed her. “You were good at art. Do you remember? You were the one who inspired me to start painting.”
Even though Vivi was losing grasp of the conversation, she recalled, in a painful flash, how it felt to sit in front of a
single leaf for long stretches at a time, studying its shape as it swung from a thread-thin axil. The delight of cataloguing
the numerous shades of nut in a chipmunk’s tail. Then, after she received a watercolor set for Christmas, the awestruck wonder
of discovering the true complicity of color. Brown on top of green becomes a deeper, woodsier shade. Blue could be warm and yellowish or it could carry the briskness of mint or it could even sit alongside the stridency
of black, deeper for the addition of darkness, more alluring somehow, like the far side of the moon . . .
Calla was still speaking. “It was like you were building a world where none of us could go. That’s probably why I began painting. I wanted to follow you into that world. And you, all you wanted was to be an artist.”
“I was a child. I didn’t know what I wanted.” The emptiness after her mother left. Paintbrushes slung into a shoebox in the
closet. That terrible dejection when Tu?n took interest in Calla’s underwater mural, after he’d never once glanced at Vivi’s drawings. Art had never been enough. Or
she had never been enough.
Tears sprang to her eyes and she swiped at them, embarrassed. Calla saw more than Vivi had given her credit for.
“Did you ever think the reason why you decided to preserve art instead of creating it was because you like the control? You
work in the shadows so no one can judge your heart or mind. You’d sooner vanish than leave yourself vulnerable.”
“Better that than painting my dirty laundry for a gallery full of strangers. How’d that vulnerability work out for you?”
Hurt zipped across Calla’s face. Vivi had never outwardly blamed Calla for her part in the Enmeshment scandal. If anything, she wanted to protect her with silence. But now, something was cracking open between them, and Vivi
felt as if she could destroy everything. It’d be easier than being exposed like this.
Calla swallowed, then said, “I’m not going to apologize for what I painted. Creation requires an act of faith. So does love.
And both scare the shit out of you. I’m not sure you’ve ever learned to love a single person in your life. How could you,
when you hate yourself so much? I don’t want this life for you, Bee.”
Calla’s face crumpled with all the wishes she held for her sister. The selfless and selfish ones both. She opened her arms
to Vivi. The desperation in her eyes was enough to give Vivi pause. Two paths opened in front of her. In one, she might allow
herself to hear her sister’s words and admit that her manner of existence in the world—remote, fearful, ridden with a nameless,
pursuant anxiety—was not the only way to survive. But that would require her to change herself completely, from beginning
to end. It would be hard work, the hardest she could imagine.
Calla’s arms wavered, then fell at her sides.
“Just stay out of my email,” Vivi said. She didn’t yell the words. They were neutral and firm, clipped with a businesslike
dismissal. “And for the love of God, please stay out of my life.”
Calla stepped back, stricken. She pulled her bottom lip under her teeth, worrying at it, her features pinching in hurt. If
Vivi had screamed at her, Calla might have been able to hold her position. Fury would be more tolerable than this icy being
who resembled her sister on the surface but bore no emotional resonance to the Vivi she loved.
The wedding banquet hall was up the street. Guests fanned themselves as they slid through the front doors and into the blissful
gusts of air conditioning that awaited them. On a side street, someone set off a spree of fireworks. There was a high whistle,
then a machine-gun round of ear-shattering pops. Cheering and smoke filled the air.
Vivi thought of watching the distant Fourth of July fireworks from Wayland’s yard when they were teenagers, how they’d slap
bugs off one another’s legs, pass around a stolen bottle. The glow of a bonfire burnishing their faces—happy, young, stupid.
It had once been easy to see the future. Now she could only take in the emptiness. A life without Calla. It was not, actually,
so unthinkable. And that was the real heartbreak of it all. Finally, a chip of ice gave way. Warmth crept reluctantly into
Vivi’s heart, dissolving some of the anger.
“Let’s take a beat,” she said. “We’re saying things we don’t mean.”
“Are we?” Calla became gentle, even as she wouldn’t meet Vivi’s gaze. “You go ahead. Find Tam’s house; find the offering. It’s your mission now. I don’t want to keep going.”
“You can’t mean that.”
“You think that all this began because I somehow couldn’t do it without your precious art history knowledge. But I didn’t
need you, Vivian Nguy?n. I included you because I wanted you, because I wanted you to be able to see me as a person you could trust. But no offering is going to fix what’s broken.”
“But—”
“Please go. I don’t need you anymore.”
Vivi had drawn the first blood, but Calla’s words became the killing blow. A person could obliterate a thing in an instant,
even those things built over countless moments of labor. It seemed unjust, wasteful, but Vivi couldn’t bear to be the one
to pick up the pieces again.
She left her sister standing in the street, surrounded by laughing wedding guests and the jaunty spill of music from the banquet
hall. Calla stared at the ground, as if she’d lost something precious in the dirt, and could not possibly, for all her seeking,
find it again.
To: Vivian Nguy?n [v_nguyen@]
From: Paul Quan [[email protected]]
Subject: Re: an offering
You’ve done what few have, Vivi Nguy?n—you’ve managed to surprise me.
But why are you wasting your time typing this out to me? It’s not an email; it’s an article. A goddamn book. I’ll even blurb
it if you remove some of the adjectives. Your prose swims in them.
The story is missing something, though. An ending. What’s the conclusion to your Tam’s great tragedy? Figure that out. Then you can understand the arc of it all.
—PQ