Chapter 35
Tu?n doesn’t want to go see the strange old lady, but his grandmother Ng?c insists. Tu?n, three years old and bolder than anyone still devoted to a pacifier should be, has better things to do with his day. There
are worms to pull from their hidey holes. His mother’s yucca cakes beg for his attention. If he asks politely, his father
might even play his flute.
But alas, it’s a day at the strange old lady’s house. The Foreigner, they call her, with awe, like it’s some great honor to
be dumped from the sea into their wasted little corner of the world. But she doesn’t look foreign; she looks just like them.
Many days, she’s in bed, sleeping the hours away. Sometimes, she roams in the forest, like a spirit from his grandmother’s
folk tales. She never goes into town. She rejects nearly all company but their family’s.
Tu?n likes the Foreigner’s knickknacks. She owns books with unfamiliar titles and squeezy bottles of a sticky, colorful substance
that she applies to a sheet. In her nightstand, she keeps a photograph of a woman with curly hair.
When the Foreigner is around, Tu?n’s grandmother doesn’t pay attention to him.
The two sit for hours, talking and talking, always about things that escape him.
Sometimes they hold hands. Other times, they cry.
But the past is an inscrutable thicket he has no urge to explore.
Tu?n is only interested in the here and now.
When their heads are bent toward each other, he thinks they look like beetles.
He kicks up the dirt and settles in the shade. If no one will listen to him, perhaps he will run away. Or maybe he’ll nap.
Nothing can’t be fixed with food or sleep. Even at his tender age, Tu?n understands happiness. He knows he will walk in joy all the days of his life. How could someone so hardy, so full of promise,
do anything but?
It’s a sprightly afternoon, neither too hot nor too cold. A breeze carries the scent of crushed lilies to his nose. He hears
the playful trickle of the river; the bowing of the trees. In the distance, wings are flapping, like sets of hands gently
meeting. The world, his personal lullaby.
At first, trapped within his musings, Tu?n doesn’t notice her. Then some tightening in the air alerts him of another presence. He turns.
The Foreigner sits on a nearby rock, a book balanced on her knee. There is a peculiar intensity in her gaze, hungry almost.
She wears men’s clothes, tailored in the European style. She’s holding something in her hand. She brings the object, a rod,
close to the page, then swishes it, the way Tu?n swishes a stick in the mud to loosen the water scorpions.
Curious, he walks to join her. “What are you doing?”
“Painting,” she says. Her voice is low. When she meets his eye, he feels like something is unknotting inside of him. Strange
and more strangeness.
“What’s that?”
“This is a paintbrush. It’s very powerful, you know. It can create anything your mind can see.”
“Anything?” Tu?n is doubtful. “Can it create a boat?”
“Of course.”
“A dragon?”
“As many as you like. It’s as good as a wand. Would you like to try?”
“No.” He feigns disinterest.
But then the pretending becomes too much.
He edges closer and closer, until his shadow covers the book.
With a small smile, the Foreigner washes the brush in a glass jar, then mixes a color for him on a nearby plate.
He thinks it’s the prettiest shade of blue he’s ever seen.
Just darker than his father’s eyes. The blue of dreams.
“You now,” she says, handing him the brush.
He holds back at first. What if he does the wrong thing and ruins her book? She opens his fist and slides the paintbrush into
it. A feeling deeper than desire moves through him at that moment.
“Let’s try together,” the Foreigner says.
She’s almost tender as she places her larger hand over his and moves the streak across the page. It shines wetly on the sea
of white. At first, he only sees a scribble. Tu?n wants to huff away. He was promised magic. But she makes a tutting sound and he stills, chastened. Foreigners are known to
be unpredictable.
He watches the scribble transform into something more. It becomes a future he cannot grasp in its entirety, one that he’s
only just beginning to sense. That glimpse fills him with a light so palpable, so blinding, that he almost bursts into tears.
How could something so beautiful have come from him? And, just as importantly, how could it have come from anyone else? Art,
he’d later come to understand, is the state of housing thousands of stories inside the broken country of your heart, then
choosing which you want to whisper into the world.
The Foreigner wraps an arm around him.
“I know, beloved,” she says. “I know.”
Tu?n will be thinking of this moment a lifetime later as he drives down the country road that judders from the farmhouse like
a wayward tail. He’ll be imagining dragons in the sky, the way their wings unfurl into the stars, how so much of life is pretending
to fly, bluster and faith, and in the end, you can never tell if you really are getting close to paradise, to love, any of
it. But you move forward, because that’s the only real antidote to death.
He’s been convinced of this ever since his father passed. When Tu?n was in his forties, Huy had died the way he lived, fitfully, with a frown on his face. But before he went, he passed an envelope
to Tu?n. Inside was a letter and a sketch. Huy’s words had been gargled with pain, but Tu?n could just make them out.
“Find my mother’s offering.”
Nonsense, of course. Their family was as ordinary as any other; no hidden treasure was waiting. And Huy’s mother had drowned.
These were all the ravings of a sick, unhappy man. Tu?n shoved the envelope in his suitcase and tried to forget about it.
Decades have passed since that moment. Decades of sitting on his father’s last words, then picking them up again, only to
toss them back down in frustration. What more did Huy want from him, this father who hardly deigned to look his way after
Ki`êu’s accident, this man chased by unconquerable monsters? Why Tu?n?
But one morning, three months before Tu?n’s death, he opened the Forster Institute’s newsletter and found an article about an unexpected bequest from a moneyed collector
in Chicago. He squinted at the pixelated image, familiar yet foreign. There was an unlocking sensation in his brain, but he couldn’t make
out what lay beyond the door until, at last, he recognized the composition. The strokes. The feeling of it.
Blue Mirror, he repeated aloud. K. P. Ly.
He retrieved the sketch his father had given him and placed it next to his computer screen. Coincidence couldn’t account for
what happened to him in that moment, nor luck, nor even fate. He was consumed by certainty, that absolute equanimity of knowing
that you were exactly where you needed to be at that moment in time.
Fueled by this balm of certainty and his newfound sobriety, Tu?n applied himself more determinedly to the mystery than he had in years before.
Now, he’s closer to the century mark than he ever thought he’d be.
There were countless moments when he should have died—when he heard the ominous tread of the VC by his head, felt his father’s blows on his teenage body, watched his own hand squeezed to rice paper under the machinery that cared nothing for his mortality—but he never did.
After eighty-two years, death has become less an enemy and more of a companion. It comes too swiftly all the same.
With each day, he feels the urgency to leave his daughters a legacy that they deserve. He’s read everything he can find about
K. P. Ly; emailed scholars who might know more. But the search leaves him humble. He admits the possibility of failure. And he knows
he can’t go to his girls with only half an idea. They deserve the full truth from him. Maybe the offering never belonged to
their family after all.
Then, just last night, he had a dream that was also a homecoming. He was ten, hiding his beloved M?c’s feathers in the house by the ravine. A bird flew against the window, striking its wings once, twice, like a warning rap.
He looked up just as a bolt of sunshine fell through the clouds, lighting up a worn tapestry on the wall. There, at its center,
was a sundial woven in gold and silver thread, the same design as the sundial in the letter his father would give him before
he passed. And all at once, Tu?n’s mind jostled into place.
He remembered the Foreigner, he remembered painting dragons with her, her name—Madame Ly—a freckle under her eye that his Vivian shared. The slumbering awareness inside of him turned over on its haunches and growled.
Tu?n had woken in a sweat. Then he’d laughed. All that time, the answer had been in his own memory.
Now, on this waking June morning, he’s driving to Chicago in the dark. If he hurries, he’ll make it to Vivian’s apartment
as the sun rises. After all, she was the one who first unlocked the mystery. Together with her sister, she is the key. He’d
memorized her address long ago, hoping for an occasion to use it. Once he proves himself. Once his amends feel true enough
for her.
The three of them, in Viet Nam, as he’s always wanted. He’ll tell his girls about May, how she was sad enough to leave, yet loved them enough to return. Ki`êu, Tam, Huy, all of them, that frayed weave of names that they would mend together. They’ll go to the Old House, they’ll find the
offering. He’ll prove that he can, this late in the game, be the father they deserve. It’s an impossible and cherished wish.
His eagerness presses against his foot, which presses against the pedal, too hard, too fast, he’s not even aware of it, the
wind shushing its warning song, chipmunks scattering from the road as the car’s fender noses on. Continents, he’d travel to
find her, his eldest, his most difficult and wounded girl. He’s only a few hours away now. He’ll knock on her door and he’ll
say, just as May used to when Vivian was nestled into their bed like a chick in down, I have a story for you, darling, oh, I’ve got a really good story to tell.
When he looks up, there’s a deer standing in the road.
It’s just a spotted fawn with shaky hairpin legs.
Why isn’t it moving? The deer blinks its lashes slowly, with infinite patience, as if time were nothing more than a myth.
Tu?n has no choice except to swerve, but he’s going too fast, and his left arm has overcompensated as it sometimes does, pulling
too hard, so the car flies past the shoulder, jumps a ditch, and barrels on. The deer vaunts to safety, none the worse for
the encounter.
But for Tu?n, it’s blue and blue and blue, soaring, joyful, all the many shades of hope that even he could not kill and the shades of
despair too, neither complete without the other.
In his last seconds, he meets the end bravely, with the dignity Ki`êu would have wanted for him, the wonder his grandmother had summoned in her final breaths. He thinks of his daughters. He hopes
they will see the world for what it can be, not what it is. Dawn’s breeze cools his flaming cheeks. And he smiles.
Hours later when they find him, before the muscles stiffen and his gaze slides, Tu?n—artist, brother, father—is still smiling. His mangled right hand rests on his chest, as if pledging to a promise that he’d
only just remembered.