Chapter 29
Vivi stood, still weak from her fever, and shrugged into fresh clothes. The usual olive-oil spill of sunshine outside the
window had dulled into the color of bleached driftwood, casting the morning with a crepuscular sheen. Turning the day on its
head. The air was spongy, soaked in moisture. Only a few days remained before Samuel’s opening. She checked her email incessantly,
but he had sent no response to her letter. The letter Calla had sent. He was busy with preparations, he’d said he wouldn’t
write again. She shouldn’t have expected anything more.
A crack of lightning sounded in the distance.
“A storm,” said Linh from the doorway. “Feel how thick it is out there. We’re due for it.”
“Has it been a rainy season?” she asked.
“No. That’s the trouble. The sky has been threatening all month. It’s been holding back for a day like this.”
Linh told Vivi that Bà Anh, her mother, had something to share with Vivi. Ki`êu had relayed Vivi’s interest in the house by the ravine, and that, combined with Vivi’s mentions of a sundial, sparked something
in the older woman’s memory.
“I’m coming right now,” Vivi said. She stepped forward so swiftly that dark spots blotted her vision.
Calla rose as they spoke. “I want to hear what she has to say too.”
The sisters walked together to the sitting room, where Bà Anh held a sheaf of papers. She handed them to Vivi. They were the plans of a building, etched on transparent drafting paper.
“Do you recognize it?” Bà Anh asked. She held a cup of tea in her palms. Jasmine-scented steam fogged in front of her.
Vivi shook her head but continued examining the blueprints. She didn’t understand until she got to the last page. On it was
an architect’s rendering of a room with a thin arrow pointing to one of the interior walls. There, sketched onto the wall,
was a tiny sundial, a crude replica of the one drawn onto the last page of Tam’s journal and her letter to Huy.
“?? má,” Calla breathed, looking over her sister’s shoulder.
“How do you have these?” Vivi was blinking rapidly. It was too much to hope for.
Bà Anh unfolded a curling edge of the blueprint. “My father was the most talented builder in town, so when Madame Ly arrived, she sought him out to renovate the house by the ravine. These belonged to him. I remember how many long hours he
worked on that renovation. It was unlivable before he got to it.”
“What does that arrow signify?” Vivi asked. She pressed her fingertip on the drawn sundial, as if it would unlock a passageway
beneath the page.
“Once, he told my mother about a strange request that Madame Ly had made. She said that he should leave a hollow space in the wall behind a tapestry she’d commissioned from a local weaver.
That drawing was his way of marking the spot, so he wouldn’t forget. She’d sworn him to secrecy, but there were no secrets
between Má and Ba.”
Vivi’s breath stilled. “What was on that tapestry?”
“The design was based on one of her paintings. My father said there were creatures the likes of which no one had ever seen—monsters
from a nightmare. They all spun around an object at the center of the tapestry.”
“A sundial.”
“A sundial.” Bà Anh paused. “So it means something to you, that sundial?”
The sisters exchanged a look. Calla nodded. Then Vivi explained to Bà Anh that they believed something had been placed in the wall behind the tapestry. Something essential to art scholarship,
yes, but also to their family. She showed her the stripped version of Blue Mirror, the photos she’d taken of Tam’s letter. She described, briefly, the contents of the journal they’d found in Arles.
“What is it? This offering you’re hoping to find?”
“I don’t know,” Vivi said. She bit the corner of her thumbnail, hesitating. “We’d need to break into the wall to find it,
whatever it is.”
Vivi thought Bà Anh might have been aghast at their sacrilege or at least try to talk them out of damaging a piece of history, but she only
looked thoughtful. “You’ve come all this way for this sundial?”
“Yes.”
“And you think Madame Ly, this K. P. Ly, is your great-grandmother Tam.”
“It’s an unbelievable tale, I know.”
Bà Anh was gazing at the pile of blueprints in front of her. Vivi could see from the tender manner in which she rearranged the
papers that she understood something about legacy. She’d preserved her own father’s for many years. Some cycles, Vivi surmised,
did not need to be broken. They went on and on, fueled by the persistence of love and memory.
Finally, Bà Anh said, “Stranger things have happened here. This delta holds a million secrets; why not Tam’s? If you say it’s so, I believe you.”
Calla asked, “Can you tell us what you remember of Madame Ly’s time at the house by the river?”
“It’s okay if it’s not much,” Vivi added. “It was a long time ago.”
“I remember more than you’d think,” Bà Anh said, a bit sharply. “That was the mid-forties, I suppose. Those were quieter times within the endless string of wars.
The war in Europe, of course, raged, but that was far away in our minds.
In our country, it was just before the Viet Minh and the French were at each other’s throats.
And I was a young girl, dying for excitement, eager to gather any bits of adult gossip I could.
So naturally I eavesdropped on my parents whenever they spoke of Madame Ly.
She reminded me of a figure from a fairy tale.
Or a spirit from a ghost story that kids like to scare each other with. ”
“She was, in a way,” Vivi said. “The woman who never drowned.”
“My father always said that Madame Ly was not entirely of this world. She didn’t scare him, exactly, but she made him nervous. Those intense eyes. That ceaseless
painting—all of which she destroyed before her death. Her sight often traveled beyond him, he said, as if she were seeing
something us normal people couldn’t. Or, as if she was waiting for something.”
Her Chaton? Her son? The impossibility of a life where she could have both? Want ran in their blood. None could escape it,
that insatiable hunger.
“In the end, Madame Ly only lived two years in that house by the river. After all the work my father put into finishing it! Of course, it wasn’t
her fault she died so soon. Only, the tragedy of it. My father said that it was a rare gift to fulfill someone’s last wish,
and that house was Madame Ly’s. She called it her ill-earned reward.”
“Were she and your father friends?” Vivi asked.
“Friendly, I’d say. She liked to talk with him about the European architecture she’d encountered in her travels. He spoke
French too and she loosened her tongue with him. She considered herself both French and Vietnamese, in between places. A citizen
of no country. It must have been difficult to live—and die—in such a lonely way.”
“What did she die of?”
“She had a malignancy of the lung, I believe. My father was there on the morning that she passed. The family was all around
her, Ng?c and Huy and even little Tu?n, who was confused, crying. My father said that Madame Ly was wheezing so hard it was difficult to understand what she wanted. She would not part her lips for even a drop of water.
But my father would never forget her last words. Those were crystal clear.”
“What were they?” The sisters asked. Unconsciously, they edged closer together.
Rain dribbled onto the tin roof. Tiny drumbeats springing from tin to wood to soil, impatient to reform into a mass greater than themselves. From sea, back to earth. The recumbent clouds above had darkened the room, so the women only saw the outlines of one another’s faces.
“My father said that Madame Ly sat up very suddenly and gasped, in a tone of awe and joy, the sort of which he had never witnessed before: ‘Oh, what a wild
and glorious blue!’ And then she laid back down and closed her eyes again. She never took another breath. That was the end.”
“Or,” Vivi said, thinking of Los Brillantes, “that was a new beginning.”
Bà Anh sighed and agreed. “We should all be so lucky.”
Despite the alienation that’d grown between them, Vivi and Calla found each other’s gazes. They spoke their intentions without
words.