Chapter 19
“Found you.”
Calla was floating in the creek, fully clothed, her arms crossed on her chest, like Dalí’s watercolor Ophelia. Her eyes were
closed, her lips pale.
She didn’t stir when she replied. “I wasn’t hiding.”
“You shouldn’t be out here alone. Especially when you can’t swim.”
“It’s three feet deep.”
“People drown in bathtubs all the time.”
“Is that true?”
“I don’t know, someone told me that once.” Kneeling a few feet away from her sister, Vivi said, “I saw the paintings in the
shed. They’re good, Button. Really good.”
“The best things I’ve done, and they don’t even belong to me.”
After a moment, Calla stood and shook her hair out. She was right; the water only reached her hip. She wafted to the bank
and hoisted herself onto a rock. She was wearing one of Vivi’s vintage tees, left behind when Vivi went to Rathmore. Fleetwood
Mac, “Sisters of the Moon.” Sopping wet now, hanging from Calla’s frame like an ancient oracle’s beard. Calla wrung the edge
of the shirt, squeezing out the dirty water.
Vivi pushed down her urge to complain about the borrowed shirt and sank down on the damp grass next to her. “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry for what happened after Enmeshment. It was the biggest mistake of my life. And you’re right. I should have been the one to tell you.”
Calla’s arm was puckered in goose pimples. Droplets of water still clung to the fine hairs there. It was September in Wisconsin,
and there was a boreal sting in the wind, just the smallest admonishment of fall. She shivered. Vivi passed her coat over
and Calla shrugged it onto her wet shoulders. They sat for a few moments, flicking at the creek with their feet.
“Say something, Calla. You can yell at me. You can push me into the water. Just—don’t look at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like you don’t know me.”
Finally, Calla sighed. “I do know you. That’s what makes it so hard. That night after the show. I was going to leave, but
then I had the cab turn around. I don’t know why. I felt bad about how it all went down. Maybe I just wanted you. And then
I glanced in the alley and I saw you kissing him. Or he was kissing you.”
“Both,” Vivi said miserably.
Calla shot her a sharp look. There was, maybe, a bit of admiration in it. Vivi wondered if Calla expected deflection.
“I figured. It was weird; I’d dreaded the moment for so long that you’d think I’d be immune to surprise. It was inevitable
really. You and him. The star-crossed lovers.”
“It wasn’t like that. I walked away from him. I knew it was wrong, Calla, I did. It never happened again.”
“I know that too. I see you, Vivi. I see what you’re capable of, and I know you’re not capable of hurting me on purpose. But you did. God, did you
both wreck me.” Calla pressed her lips together. They were chapped like mountain ridges. “The worst part was your silence.
I waited and waited, thinking each time you called that that would be the moment when you pulled the curtain down between us. But you talked about stupid things, the museum, gossip from
Rathmore, things I didn’t give a shit about, and never anything I did. I think I would have forgiven you if you’d just told
me.”
“I was afraid to lose you.”
Calla gave her a wry smile.
“Please forgive me,” Vivi said. “Or don’t. But don’t shut me out, Button. I can’t keep losing you.”
Vivi was crying; or it was some strange pantomime of tears. Her shoulders heaved, her breathing was choked, but nothing came
out. She felt as if she were hyperventilating. There were emotions that couldn’t find release. Calla would be justified in
walking out of her life and there’d be nothing Vivi could do to stop her.
Then her sister reached over and wound her hand into Vivi’s, braiding their fingers together. She squeezed ferociously, the
way she used to when Vivi woke from a night terror in their childhood. One, two pumps, a steadfast resuscitation. I am here. You are not alone. Vivi’s breaths began to even.
Finally, Calla said, “Come on. I have something to show you at the farmhouse. Another letter.”
Vivi struggled to modulate her breathing. “From Ly?”
“No. From Dad.”
Back in the farmhouse, Calla showered and changed. She came down in Tu?n’s faded robe, smelling of his Old Spice shampoo, her face scrubbed free of dirt from the woods. On the pine table in the
kitchen, Vivi had arranged items from the pantry, all likely expired, onto their mother’s stoneware platter. Sesame crackers
and Flower-brand paté, canned hearts of palm, a pungent tangle of spicy, dried squid. Tu?n used to sit up late listening to Vietnamese music, beer in one hand, a clutch of squid in the other.
Ever the traditionalist, he eschewed the newly emergent V-Pop movement for the folk ballads of his youth. Vivi had found the
music insistently sentimental, privately referring to their collective as the Whining of the Ancestors. Now, she wondered
if she was only too jejune to understand that Tu?n’s devotion to the music was an outcropping of his diasporic yearning. Home, for a Vietnamese person, would always be a fraught thought exercise.
Calla moved to the kettle and filled it.
“You still know where everything is,” Vivi observed.
“Some things, you don’t forget.”
“What was he like before he died? Dad?” Vivi surprised herself with the question. She had thought of her curiosity toward
him as an anthropological one, but now she found herself leaning in for the answer.
Calla sat across from her, reaching for a cracker. “These are stale. I don’t know how to answer that, Bee. I was getting to
know him again and in a lot of ways, it was like getting to know a stranger.”
“He wasn’t like the dad we knew?”
“That’s the thing. We remember different versions of him. After you left for college, it was just him and me. I was so fucking
mad at you. I knew you had to go. But I was also sad, just heartbroken that you could leave me. Wayland was the only person
I could count on.”
Vivi hadn’t thought of how her departure had pushed the two of them together. How it might have pushed Tu?n and Calla together too, in unexpected ways.
“Did Dad hit you?” she asked, voice tight. Tu?n had only tried corporeal punishment a few times in their youth, but those few times were enough to leave an indelible imprint.
Vivi still flinched at sudden sounds and movements, like a rabbit startled by a bark.
“No, nothing like that. He just ignored me completely.”
“Thank God.” Calla gave her an incredulous stare. Vivi amended her statement. “I mean, thank God that he didn’t hurt you.”
“There are lots of ways to cause a person pain.”
Calla was dredging her fingers through the cracker crumbs, making mandalas on the table. “At first, I felt so alone. So extraneous. And then I was just plain bored. That’s when I started drinking. Found a group of seniors who didn’t mind when I tagged
along while they partied. And you weren’t writing or calling.”
Vivi knew this was true. She was trying to make a new life for herself and she was afraid that Calla would pull her backward. Under the table, she pinched her thigh, a punitive gesture that changed nothing at all.
Calla went on. “I did everything I could to escape that loneliness. But even within the mess that was my teenage years, there
were moments of—not happiness, that’s not right—moments of harmony between Dad and me, I guess. Sometimes we’d eat dinner
together, chewing our food like cows. Once or twice, he asked me what I was painting. Mostly we stayed in our own rooms and
waited each other out. He was still drinking, but he wasn’t an angry drunk anymore. Just a resigned one. I didn’t care one
way or another. I was drinking too, secretly, wherever I could. What a pathetic pair we were.”
“Is that why you followed me to Rathmore? Because you didn’t want to be alone anymore?”
Calla smiled slightly. “And because Wayland was going to Columbia College.”
“What changed with Dad? In the years before he died, I mean.”
“I saw hints of who he could be after you left for college, but sobriety was what finally did it. Transformed him, you could
say. He’d come to an impasse with his anger. That’s how he put it. It was like staring down this great bull who wouldn’t budge.
And he kept trying to fly at it from all angles, to knock it down, but then he realized: he could just turn around and walk
away.”
“Dad said all that?” Tu?n, even in his best moments, would never have been described as voluble.
“Yeah. When I finally came back to Deer Creek, I couldn’t recognize him. You know, I’d never pictured him without some sort
of scowl. He seemed afraid to smile, like it would crack his face open. But then I saw his smile—Bee, his real smile. Sort
of shy and silly and always when you least expected it. Even the way he moved was more fluid, less jerky, like someone had
removed a steel rod from his skeleton. And when we talked, it seemed that he was listening with his whole mind, not just a
sliver of it.”
“I wish I’d been able to experience that version of him.” It was the first time Vivi could admit that, maybe, there was a side of her father that might’ve been hidden from her.
“I never really knew what made him want to be sober. People talk about rock bottom. I had the sense that, for him, it was
exhaustion. Or maybe plain old common sense. It’s what did it for me.”
“I believe you, you know. I’m sorry I didn’t before.”
“I guess I wouldn’t have either, in your place. I still have my moments of relapse. You’ve seen them. I know I’m not a perfect
sober citizen. But mostly, I’m okay.”
“Good. Good. I’m proud of you, Button.” She paused. “No, not just proud. I’m in awe of you.”
Calla pulled an envelope from the pocket of the robe and pushed it across the table to Vivi. “This had fallen behind the end
table in his bedroom. When I opened the window to air the stink, the wind blew the envelope out. The letter is in Vietnamese.
I ran it through a translation app. But you won’t need that.”
The envelope was unstamped and unsealed, thick with irregularly folded pages. The handwriting was the same as it’d ever been,
slashing and hurried, slanting so far to the right that the letters seemed to topple along the invisible horizon of the baseline.
The recipient’s address was unrecognizable to Vivi, except for the city. Long Xuyên. The letter was dated the week before their father’s death.