Chapter 20
The rental car zoomed down the long drive, a shiny sedan that looked out of place among the dust of the farmhouse. From the
porch, Vivi squinted, imagining her father’s maroon truck instead. The truck was gone now, totaled and likely disassembled
in a junkyard somewhere off the highway. That clunker had spent decades huffing along, like an ancient horse coerced into
labor, exhaust coughing from the back pipes, smelling like cigarettes and vanilla car deodorizer, glove compartment stuffed
with Tu?n’s speeding tickets. She felt a complicated rush of affection for the old truck. It’d gotten them where they needed to go
for so many years but couldn’t manage to deliver their father safely in the end.
Calla tapped the side of the car door through the open window, then leapt out with bags of Chinese takeout. For a moment,
Vivi saw her mother coming home from an errand. With each year, Calla looked more and more like May. Or maybe May’s memory
had begun to elide with Calla’s aliveness.
“You’ll never guess who I ran into,” Calla called. “Scotty Patel. Remember that kid?”
Vivi had wiped a porch table and set it with plates and napkins.
They dumped out piles of lo mein, fried chicken in a sticky sauce, green beans with puckered skins.
Vivi felt as if she hadn’t eaten real food in days.
They tucked in without ceremony, eating in that graceless way they used to, bent like long-necked giraffes toward their plates.
Calla, who’d never learned to use chopsticks well, jabbed at the chicken with a flimsy plastic fork.
“He asked about you, Scotty. The flame still lives on.”
“We went to one dance in the seventh grade. He tried to kiss me but only managed to spit his gum into my mouth.”
“That’s all it took apparently. Scotty’s married to Maddie, that girl with the teeth and those tattoo chokers, remember her?
They have, like, eighteen children. He’s in local politics now, elected as some bullshit commissioner or other. He was telling
me that the town’s going through some sort of revival. They’re trying to position it as the next Asheville, an artistic getaway.”
“Deer Creek.” Vivi didn’t bother to stifle her incredulity.
“Scotty says we could make a fair profit on this house. When we sell it.”
“Times are a’changing.”
“But China Garden never does.”
Finally, they pushed the last of the food away and leaned back on the rattan bench. It was coming apart, snakes of brown cording
falling off the underside of the seat, a symptom of the house’s chronic disrepair. Tu?n hadn’t maintained any of it. There were likely black mold and trapped animals in walls, in addition to the many cosmetic
updates needed to make the place enticing to buyers. Vivi thought Scotty was wrong; they would lose money on this old property
once taxes were paid and repairs were made. Better to demolish it than put it on the market.
And yet, as she looked out on the setting sun with its zebra stripes of scarlet and smoke, she felt a pang. Her childhood
could be counted in horizons. Snuffed-out golds fighting through the batting of clouds in winter. A sidling of orange in the
spring, a shade that would always remind her of peeled clementines. Over the years, she’d sat on the bench with Calla, bickering
about nothing at all as they doodled in the margins of their books. Sometimes she’d sat with Wayland, crossing and uncrossing
her legs like a demented crane, sure that her heart would beat right out of her chest if he looked at her a second longer.
Their childhood wasn’t idyllic. But the land could—did—tell stories.
It held the promise of change yet managed to cling to a certain reassurance of stability.
The players might switch in and out, but the sunset would always come.
The trees, taller each season, would continue to provide hiding places for children whose imaginations often overtook their reality.
Vivi had a brief thought that, despite it all, the yellow farmhouse might be a good place to raise kids.
A sandstorm of russet and umber went barreling through their yard, yapping the whole way.
“Baxter,” Calla supplied. “He’s a brindled mutt. Ugly thing; but sweet as hell. He and his owner, Robin, live next door, in
the blue colonial. I’ll never be able to think of it as anything but Wayland’s place. When I glance over, I half expect him
to come racing, trying to get you to go on some adventure with him.”
“I expect to see Dad coming out the side door, scowling about something or other.”
“Or Mom with her scissors, trying to chase us down for one of her terrible haircuts.”
The sisters sat with the old ghosts, giving them their due. Their mother was dead. Their mother had been trying to return
to them. These were numbing thoughts. The impact of these revelations would hit in unexpected ways for the rest of their lives
and that too was their cross to bear.
Both had wept after Vivi set down the letter. They clung to each other, burying their faces in one another’s necks. Minutes?
Hours? The tears eventually dried, insufficient. Their mother’s disappearance had already wormed a hole inside of them; now,
with her death, that hole was being filled with something different, a viscous regret that neither wanted to touch.
Vivi swung her feet against the bench legs. “It’s strange. Trying to rearrange everything we knew about them. What if she
hadn’t left that night and just stayed with us? Would she still be alive?”
“I’ve been asking myself the same thing.”
“Maybe he wouldn’t have been so bad if she’d returned. Maybe he’d have gotten sober sooner with her here.”
Calla shrugged. “What I know about addiction is that it finds you eventually. Sometimes you win the battle; most of the time, you lose. But it’s a song in your blood, you know? If it wasn’t Mom leaving, it would have been something else. You can’t love a person into sobriety.”
“Do you think they wanted to be strangers with us? Or was it just . . . I don’t know. Immigrating? Language barriers?”
“I think parents are always strangers to their children. May and Tu?n just took it to extremes.”
“It runs in our family. Extremes.”
Calla’s lips quirked and Vivi thought for a second that she was going to snap back. Instead, she flung up a shoulder in a
self-deprecating manner. “At least we come by the dramatics honestly. Tell me what you know about the offering. Don’t leave
a thing out.”
As twilight began to spread, a fist slowly unsplaying, Vivi shared all she knew about Tam’s connection to their family. About Long Xuyên and how, with the address from their father’s unsent letter, they finally knew where to look. The house by the ravine. Calla
had suspected some familial connection to Tam after reading their father’s last letter, but she didn’t know exactly how the pieces fell together. She hadn’t understood
that Ly was a woman. Now, she bounced in her seat, newly alert.
“She’s our great-grandmother. K. P. Ly is our great-grandmother.” Calla clutched at Vivi’s wrist.
“No wonder Dad was obsessed with her.”
“Wait. Do you think they’d met each other?”
It was Vivi’s turn to shrug. “It seems unlikely. But our uncle would know for sure.”
“Our uncle Ki`êu,” Calla marveled. “In Long Xuyên. Did you know he was alive?”
“Not until just a few hours ago. I assumed—”
“We both assumed.”
“We could write him.”
“We could go see him.”
The midges were coming out. “No-see-ums,” as the kids used to say. They couldn’t make out the specks in the darkening twilight
but felt their sting anyway. Vivi slapped at a midge that’d dug itself into her neck.
“We could go see him,” she agreed. “Should we? Go to Viet Nam?”
“I still have Dad’s ashes,” Calla told her, a trace of guilt in her voice. “We could take them to Long Xuyên too.”
Vivi’s mouth hinged open. “You said you were going to spread them!”
“I was going to! But no place ever seemed important or meaningful enough. What, the BP that went out of business? The lumberyard
where he lost his hand? Not like we had a lot of good memories to pick from.”
“I see what you mean. Okay, bring the ashes.”
“I’m keeping them in an Altoids tin.”
Vivi had a sudden recollection of finding mints in Calla’s suitcase. The container had felt strangely light when she picked it up. Slowly, she asked, “Did you take our father’s ashes to Arles? In an Altoids tin?”
“I like to travel light.”
“Calla Nguy?n!” But Vivi was laughing.
“Mint-infused dad cremains.”
“Stop it.” Vivi kicked at her.
Mischief draining, Calla said, “I spread some over the entrance of the estate before I left. I think he would have liked Provence.
He always wanted to see Europe.”
The sisters were sober for a moment. Vivi would never have imagined that their father harbored any wanderlust. Every vacation
he took was spent in Viet Nam. He dismissed May’s timid suggestions for them to take family trips to Chicago, Mackinac Island.
White people vacations. When the girls are older, we’ll take them home.
To Viet Nam. Back then, she hadn’t understood exactly what drew him to the same place over and over again.
And now she knew. A brother, still alive; a network of relatives, possibly, who could illuminate the cipher that was their father.
The thought filled Vivi with a vacillation of hope and its other, more complicated foil, a frustrated and consuming despair.
Her parents’ secrets had whittled away at their family, shaving at the truth until all that was left was a brittle core that could be snapped between a child’s fingers.
Calla slapped at her own shoulder. “These no-see-ums are killing me. Let’s go inside. But I don’t want to go to sleep yet.
I’m too buzzed from—everything.”
“There are probably DVDs around somewhere. We can watch a movie.”
“Or we can watch Little House.”
May had carried a fierce devotion to Little House on the Prairie. Perhaps it was the Wisconsin connection. Or maybe she identified with Caroline Ingalls, the calm, self-sacrificing mother
she wanted to be. Many evenings, she’d stay up late watching syndicated reruns, until one Christmas when Tu?n bought her a boxed set of the DVDs. Then the sisters watched too, finding any excuse to sit with their harried mother in
peace.
The year before she left, May made them costumes based on Mary and Laura Ingalls, braiding Calla’s hair, sewing white Peter
Pan collars onto floral bedsheets-turned-dresses.
Whoever heard of Chinese pioneer girls? some kid had sneered during trick-or-treating.
Vivi shoved the boy backward, surprising them both with her force. He fell on the pavement, Halloween candy scattered around
him. We’re Vietnamese, dummy. And we can be whoever the fuck we want to be.
Tu?n watched the confrontation from a distance up the street. Vivi thought he’d reprimand her for pushing the kid or for using
a curse word, even though she’d learned such behavior from him, but he only winked, a flick of an eyelid that disappeared
before she fully registered it, then walked on to the next house. It was complicated, his pride in her violence.
“Okay, let’s do it.” Vivi pulled Calla to standing. She quoted, with a catch in her voice, “Because ‘home is the nicest word
there is.’”
They poked a fire into being and sat on the couch in front of the small Sony television, a musty-smelling fleece spread on
their laps.
The swelling opening credits to Little House on the Prairie would always fill Vivi with a sense of borrowed contentment. Ma and Pa jogging along in their covered wagon through the red-clay town. Little Carrie tumbling in the grass, a fortuitous filming accident that the director kept in.
“Michael Landon is a zaddy,” Calla declared. “So tan and rugged. With those suspenders.”
“Don’t talk about Pa Ingalls that way.”
“I’d like to homestead his prairie.”
The windows were open at Calla’s insistence, after she’d declared the house a mausoleum of odors. A breeze wended in and stirred
the newspapers laying around. Calla placed the Altoids tin on the table in front of them, raising her brows in response to
Vivi’s drawn ones. Vivi shook her head and settled back onto a lumpy throw pillow.
From the beginning, each Ingalls sister had their delineated role: Mary, the eldest, was a scold, a worrywart. The good one.
Laura was the tomboy, attuned to adventure, repelled by injustice. Theirs was an uneasy yet steadfast love. Or maybe it wasn’t
so much love as an alliance based on proximity and need.
After a few episodes, Vivi paused the DVD. “I’m not sure this aged well.”
“I don’t remember it being so religious.”
“Mary is a pain in the ass, isn’t she?”
“Sure is. But what the hell would Laura have done without her? Go on, Bee, play the next one.”
They watched until they both began to drowse on the couch, the drawl of Ma and Pa humming in the background. Calla giggled
in her sleep, waking Vivi. In that moment, a smile still on her lips, her lashes long on her cheeks, Calla was eight again,
a ruddy-faced kid running in the woods.
Vivi reached over to slip the antler ring from Calla’s hand. She placed it onto her own finger, unable to discern whether
it was a relief or a discomfort to claim the ring’s warm weight again.
“My turn,” she whispered.
To: Paul Quan [[email protected]]
From: Vivian Nguy?n [v_nguyen@]
Subject: Re: an offering
Paul,
You won’t believe where I am. Or maybe you will. Below me, the mountains of Kazakhstan sit beneath a tattered afghan of clouds.
The peaks jut through every so often, like bony kneecaps, and even though it’s almost night, I can make them out. I’ve never
been to Kazakhstan. I’ve never been to Long Xuyên either, but that’s where I’ll be in a few short hours. And then, when I return, I’ll move backward through time zones again,
reclaiming whatever I lost along the way. Hopefully.
First: thank you. Your offering changed everything for me. The location you sent pointed me to a town in Viet Nam, as you said. I have a strong belief that K. P. Ly was born at that spot, or at least, spent time there. Maybe that’s even where she disappeared to in the end. Yes, she.
Because you’ve given me trust—companionship—during this pursuit, I can give you something too. Forgive the way I’m about to
tell this story. I’ve always thought flying in an airplane to be a dissociative experience—we’re between places, between fields
of consciousness. The pressure in my ears makes me feel dizzy and odd, but also clear and wise. So my narrative will likely
reflect the strangeness of my circumstance.
Here we go.
Imagine at the start of our story a young woman, an artist, born between a vast fold of farmland and the press of a river that once carried emperors and pestilence, flower petals and frog innards alike.
Within this contradiction of sublimity and crudeness, the artist honed her eye for beauty and molded her spirit to accommodate horror.
Her name, Tam, means “heart,” and for all the betrayals she would endure and inflict, that heart remained steadfast in the things she most
loved . . .