Chapter 13
When Vivi woke, her hand reached to touch the freckle on her cheek. Once, not so many generations ago, a lover had pressed
her rouged lips to a similar star, memorialized it in defiance and desire. And here the star appeared again, as a sort of
unreadable punctuation mark within a story that continued to resist conclusion.
She looked up to find Calla’s empty bed. Vivi’s laptop had shut off, but within it, inside a typo-laced document, she’d saved
a full translation of the journal, which lay open in front of her, splayed to the final page. She’d worked all night on the
translation, understanding that was the least she could do for her sister and knowing that was still not enough.
By now, it was past noon. The hallways of the inn were flurried with activity: guests banging doors, bellhops wheeling luggage
racks, jouncing the credenzas with offended bursts of noise. Vivi didn’t mind her sister’s absence. Calla had a way of crowding
her thoughts, so that Vivi had no space left for her own. Without her, the air was dull and skimmed, but Vivi breathed more
easily.
As she showered, she continued thinking through the entries she’d read. This journal, she became convinced, couldn’t be the
offering. Below the very last entry, there was another drawing of a sundial, almost identical to the one in the letter that
Calla had found in their father’s shed. I will go toward the light and leave the best of myself there. Another clue. Where Vivi should have felt satisfaction, she instead succumbed to frustration. The goalpost had moved again.
She drew a heart in the condensation on the shower glass. What would Samuel do?
She could almost hear his voice through the steam. Let’s outline the facts, V. What do you know?
Nguy?n was a common enough surname in Vietnamese circles, but she’d only encountered a handful of Tams in her lifetime. Vivi flipped through her paltry store of recollections, trying to locate the name. It returned to her with
increasing urgency, like a child tugging at a shirtsleeve. Then she remembered Calla, drawing on the bedspread with her fingertips.
Tam means “heart,” doesn’t it?
Gruesome drowning situation.
I’ll tell you the story sometime.
The truth arrived as a locomotive tearing through the density of brain matter, swift and determined. Still dripping with water
from the shower, Vivi ran to the desk in the suite, fumbling with the drawers. On a piece of rose-scented stationery, she
sketched a family tree.
Before he was their father, he was Tu?n, son of Huy and brother of Ki`êu. She calculated backward. Tu?n was born in 1940; Ki`êu, some years after, though she couldn’t be certain how many. If their grandfather Huy was in his twenties in the 1940s, then
he could have been born when Tam was a teenager. The timeline could have worked. It did work.
And if their grandfather was the same Huy from the journals, he had to be the baby of the sunlight, of the drowned mother
who didn’t drown, the orphan who was not really an orphan.
Ng?c was Huy’s aunt and adopted mother. And so: the beautiful and doomed Tam Nguy?n who never appeared on the shrine, who became a ghostly cautionary tale, was their great-grandmother.
That was why Tu?n had the letter and the sketch of Blue Mirror.
They weren’t mere discoveries. They were inheritances.
How long had her father known all this? Had he been unsnarling this mystery since childhood? Or did he discover both afterward, on one of his trips back to Viet Nam?
Vivi now recalled the singularity of their grandfather’s photograph on the family shrine. In Huy’s blurry, black-and-white
portrait, she’d marked a handsome man with dark hair and light skin. Eyes that were lighter still. They could have been blue.
Even in her father, Vivi could occasionally detect an ethnic ambiguity that troubled her. Once winter arrived, his melanin
would fade and he would become as pale as the other men about town. If he turned at the right angle toward the window, the
gloam might transform his features into a marbled hardness that she might not, for a second, recognize. As a child, she shrugged
off any cognitive dissonance she didn’t want to understand. They were all shades of the people who came before. Heritage,
an endless mystery.
What did it mean to rediscover oneself in a river of names that, after all this time, finally gained shape? Vivi had read
about the thrill that other seekers got when they stumbled on an astonishing entry on a genealogy site; how some might uproot
photographs in an attic that told a story they couldn’t resist prying open.
Those clues were always just the beginning. Few could muster the will to drop a mystery once they’d discovered it. Vivi, least
of all. She ran to find her sister.
For a moment, Jean resembled Tam’s description of her Chaton—auburn hair, intelligent green eyes. Vivi could ignore the standard-issue polo Jean wore and
the Barbie-pink polish on her nails. The concierge desk disappeared. So too the desktop, the business cards, the murmuring
trickle of guests across the lobby. Vivi saw only Justine Allard, tilting her head toward Tam, merriment and challenge piercing her gaze.
“There you are,” Jean said. Her voice broke the illusion. “The art scholar?”
“That’s me. Have you seen my sister?”
“She went tearing through the dining room early this morning.” Jean made a moue of disapproval. “There was a sightseeing tour.
She hopped on it, I think.”
Vivi tapped her foot in frustration. Who knew when Calla would return?
Jean continued. “I was hoping to see you though. You asked about the archives for the summer of 1936.”
“You’ve found something?”
“There isn’t much. The original Allards sold the property not long after they bought it, so the folder on them is quite thin.
But here’s the whole of it. Please return it after you are done.”
She slid a manila folder across the counter.
“I can’t thank you enough.”
“I looked up Ly, after you mentioned him. His work is compelling. I like Terrible Feast the best.”
“Most do.”
It was a clever subversion of the Dutch still-life tradition, in which buck and fowl carcasses draped over butcher blocks
as bloodied trophies from woodland hunts. In Terrible Feast, the animals were not so inert. They cocked their heads from a table set in front of a river, as if waking from a performance
in which they had to play dead. The hunters were nowhere to be seen, but their arrows and cloaks were scattered among the
landscape. Most saw the painting as a referendum on power and the ways we remain complicit in tropes of violence. Now the
painting reminded Vivi of Marcel Allard and his love of hunting.
“My brother was an artist,” Jean said. “He painted landscapes too, but they weren’t anything like your Ly’s. I have always wanted to paint. But he was the talent, so I never thought I could compete.”
“Was it a competition?”
She laughed, rueful. “Isn’t it always, between siblings?”
“What does he do now?”
“He works in cryptocurrency. I don’t understand a word of it. He has not picked up a brush in years. All that wasted promise. He doesn’t even like his job.”
“What would you paint?”
She looked out the window, distant. “Maybe I’d paint someplace I haven’t been. I’ve never left Arles.”
“You could.”
“I suppose. But why, when this is home?”
Vivi settled at a café table near the window. Outside, a couple posed next to Justine Allard’s flower gardens. The man wore
a pressed pair of slacks the color of a spring sky; the woman, a white sun dress that tied behind her neck. From the way they
leaned toward each other, Vivi knew it was an engagement shoot. How awkward and self-conscious love could be once you tried
to capture it. The man made a joke and the woman frowned at it, swatting him on the lapel.
You always pull this shit—
The photographer let her camera slump as they bickered, unembarrassed.
Inside the envelope Jean had given her, there was a butcher’s bill for an inordinate amount of chicken livers and a map of
the original property, along with some annotations of the estate’s landmarks. Vivi noticed that neither the cottage nor the
bench were on the map. There were census reports and records of servants who’d come and gone.
At the bottom of the pile, she found a collection of photographs. She gingerly lifted each. In one, a man leaned on his rifle
near a fallen deer, smug and towering, with thick limbs and a mustache that defied gravity. It had to be Marcel. Handsome,
in a brutal way. The type of man who, if he lived today, would muscle you out of the way on a narrow sidewalk.
Next was a formal portrait of Marcel and Justine, sitting in front of a draped muslin backdrop. She was elegant, but not as
beautiful as Vivi would have imagined from Tam’s descriptions, nor from her representation in Blue Mirror.
Justine was set back from the camera lens just a touch more than Marcel, as if allowing him to be the focus of attention.
Her waves hung a bit limply and her expression had a certain hardness to it.
Yet, despite her prosaic appearance, the set of her mouth hinted at a daring that Vivi suspected hid under those layers of studied manners. The Chaton, gliding just out of sight.
Finally, at the very bottom of the pile of photographs, there was a candid of a party. The crepe of night hung above the crowd.
Dancing couples in their finest draped against one another, covertly watching one another’s partners. A man with a faint resemblance
to Justine appeared to be making a toast. Emil?
But there—in the corner of the photograph—a figure in a light-colored dress, standing at a distance from the others. An island.
Her dark hair hung about her shoulders in a severe and chunky bob. Due to the deteriorated quality of the photograph and her
face being in profile, Vivi couldn’t identify the woman well. But she could just make out the freckle on her cheek.
Vivi turned the photograph over. In fine, spidery handwriting: September, 1936. The last fête. Without a second thought, Vivi slipped the photo into her pocket. She could have made a copy, but she didn’t want a facsimile.
She wanted the original. It could go in her tally of petty crimes, those Samuel might condemn if she ever revealed them. But
she could hold the guilt. She always did.