Chapter 24
After the cooking was done—piles of vermicelli cakes and golden circles of patê s? and salads with curls of shrimp on top—the
Nguy?n women crammed themselves into the main sitting room, loath to depart to their own homes. Vivi had the stray thought that,
had things been different, their mother would have been wedged within this matriarchal clutch, too, animated by the comfort
of familiar bodies quilted together without a trace of self-consciousness. Their father, drinking endless cups of tea on the
back deck with his brother, shaking his legs to ward off mosquitoes.
Of course, this was another fantasy, a child’s fantasy. Their parents were dead. They were orphans. Vivi had never understood
until recently how the thought of her mother—vanished, but never completely gone—had girded an underlying hope she’d nurtured
since she was seven years old. She’d imagined, sometime in her life, at a moment when she least expected to, she might turn
on a street corner and come upon May, decades older but still herself, still a mother to two heartsore sisters. But that’s
the funny thing about hope. It’s a weed, easily pulled yet also built for proliferation. Where one dies, another crops up
in an adjacent plot, proud and stubborn as ever.
Above them, fan blades shook the rafters in energetic loops. The women wilted on settees and lay on the floor, toes waggling
toward the ceiling. Limbs on limbs, hands crossing unceremoniously to retrieve a magazine, a comb. Some of the cousins were
painting Khánh’s nails in a blush-pink shade. Aunts were arguing over the order of the next day’s bridal processional, slyly claiming dynastic hierarchy through the assignment of roles.
The steadfastness of family had always seemed a myth to Vivi. But now, she was seized with the realization of all she’d missed
out on. What they’d all missed out on. Was it luck that made a family, or an instinct, a skill she could never hone? How did
everyone else do it? For the first time, she wanted to put her mind to this question. That mind couldn’t help tugging toward
Samuel and Phoebe.
Across the length of a sofa, Bà Anh snored with her feet on a cushion, while Linh, sitting near her on the tile, asked Vivi and Calla eager questions about
Wisconsin.
“I wish I could have seen it. Your home,” Linh said. “Anh Tu?n spoke of it like a kind of promised land.”
The phrase gave Vivi pause. Whose promise? And when, for her father, had that promise been shattered? When his hand slid into
the blades of a saw, one terrible, sunlit afternoon? When May pocketed her passport and walked out without a backward glance?
“Tell us about Wisconsin,” Khánh urged, glancing up from her polished nails.
Every opportunity to revisit Deer Creek, even if only in the imagination, gave the sisters a chance to retrieve the moments
of the past and examine them. What did they want to share with this family, their family, who seemed to have only known the
best version of their father?
In the end, through a silent negotiation of crooked eyebrows and meaningful gazes, the sisters chose to tell a fabular version
of their childhoods. They described how the fog would edge onto the surface of the creek in early spring. The fiery tornado
of maple leaves falling onto their anoraks as they walked home from school. Wolves howling in the night, great horned owls
posted on fences, tufts lifted in fretful inquiry. Their Long Xuyên relatives were rapt.
Once the sisters began, they couldn’t stop.
Vivi recalled the time Tu?n pulled them from their beds to go fishing for brook trout; Calla described how May took them to the county fair, winning a giant stuffed badger for them with her unexpected ring toss skills.
Together, they told a tale of Americana, of woodland enchantment and unremitting sisterhood.
Vivi was surprised to find that this tale, hovering somewhere above the other, untold moments, was as true a recollection as the stories they didn’t want to tell.
Narrative, after all that, was only a filter through which meaning—varied, contradictory, subversive—could sift. Easily picked up, easily discarded.
Calla had found a piece of paper and a pen and begun sketching the groups of women. The household pup, a mutt with a drool-slicked
chin, came out from under the stairs and nestled up to her leg. Absentmindedly, she scratched behind its ears.
Looking over Calla’s shoulder, Vivi glimpsed gestural curves that suggested the sloping rhythms of domestic intimacy. It was
the first original work she’d seen from Calla in a long time. After Enmeshment, Calla would not talk about her art. Even her closest friends complained that she’d become too private about her paintings.
No one knew what inspired her anymore. Maybe she didn’t know herself. Vivi hadn’t been certain that Calla would ever work
again.
“It’s good, Button.”
“I know.” Calla didn’t glance up from her page, but a tiny smile played at the edge of her mouth. Nothing was so hard-won,
nor so sincere, as a sibling’s straightforward praise.
Linh disappeared into the hall and returned with a medium-sized canvas. “Your descriptions make his paintings come alive.
I think you’d like this one.”
The painting depicted the farmhouse in Deer Creek, captured at sunset, when the shadows were most dramatic. Tu?n had used a pronounced tenebrism technique to enhance the contrast between light and dark, casting a dappled spotlight onto
the farmhouse roof. His primary tones were ochre and verdaccio green, which made it seem as if the painting had been dipped
in the creek, coated with doleful nostalgia.
But, despite the faintly anachronistic technique, his was a faithful portrait.
The sisters spied the same saggy porch with the broken board, the shutters on the windows edged with hangnails of paint.
In the drive, the maroon truck had been parked at an angle, its windows rolled halfway down.
Far in the background, almost too far to catch, two small figures were leaping over a fence.
It was unclear whether they were headed into the dark clutch of woods behind the farmhouse or back home.
“That’s us,” Vivi said. She turned to Calla, whose eyes had begun to fill. “Isn’t it?”
“Of course it’s us.”
The knowledge sunk like a bar of soap in the bath, edges softening. Their father, an artist. Failed or paused, on a long sabbatical.
It was strange yet inevitable to discover this here, as if the most sacred part of him had been enshrined in his hometown.
We are different people in different places. Context, the hand that shapes identity and, sometimes, remembrance.
Linh said, “He painted it during his final visit. This was before May left. Before his accident. He wanted us to have a piece
of you girls.”
But why, Vivi wondered, hadn’t he brought them back to Viet Nam? Or told them about this other family waiting for them? They’d thought themselves alone in the world, three marbles jumbling
around a dismal little house.
“We’ve never seen his paintings,” Calla said. Her fingertip hovered over the fence line. “He’s sort of got this epic Dutch
Golden Age thing going on, right?”
“Rembrandt,” Vivi agreed, taking the canvas in her hands.
“I was thinking of the Flemish landscapists.”
“No chance. They were too tonal. And there were rarely figures in their work.”
“But look at the haze over here, near the grass. Rembrandt would have never fallen into that romanticism.”
Linh glanced back and forth between them, a bemused expression settling as they argued. Vivi handed the painting back to her.
“I’m sorry. We do this. Bicker too much. Especially about art.”
“I was just thinking how much you remind me of my own siblings.”
“Do you have any more of our father’s paintings?” Calla asked.
“Many.” The voice trailed from a back hallway, slightly high-pitched and unfamiliar. “We’ll show you all of them.”
Linh got up. “That’s your C?u Ki`êu. I’ll help him. He doesn’t need it, but I like to be needed.”
Linh brought their uncle into the room in a wheelchair. Ki`êu was an unassuming man, his hands placed on his lap, a shy smile tugging the sides of his mouth. He was clean-faced and sparse-haired,
dressed in gray slacks and a linen button-down with a missing button near the collar. Thick white brows shielded eyes that
were heavily lined at the corners, a product of a life of mirth. They’d learned that he was seventy-seven years old, five
years their father’s junior, born the year that Tam had died.
Vivi studied him for similarities with Tu?n. The brothers didn’t resemble each other in any discernible way, except perhaps in the rise of their cheekbones. Where her
father possessed a brutish charisma, Ki`êu seemed gentle to a fault, like the sort of man who might frequently be taken advantage of by men like Tu?n. Lion and mouse, an unlikely brotherhood.
Bà Anh said with overblown cheer, “Look who’s come! Tu?n’s girls from America.”
As Ki`êu studied them, Vivi saw that his eyes were not blue or black, but some shade in between. The color of hawk’s eye quartz; of
pines in shadow on the coldest of January twilights; of rare sea creatures and pockets of the galaxies that light sought but
could never reach.
Finally, their uncle said, “You’re just as I expected. Anh Tu?n had talked of you constantly. I worried over you after—”
He stopped, as if the fact of his brother’s passing was too terrible to articulate.
Why hadn’t he written them after Tu?n’s death?
Or, for that matter, all those years before, when a friendly voice would have made all the difference?
Maybe he had written in the last few months, but the letters had arrived unanswered, stuffed into the mailbox that neither sister bothered to clear out after the funeral.
Missed chances, the story of their lives.
Calla, buoyant in nearly any social situation, nearly throttled him with a hug. “We already feel like we’ve come home, C?u Ki`êu.”
Vivi could only observe his mannerisms with taciturn detachment, searching for a break in his gentleness.
After the pleasantries and explanations, Ki`êu said, “I’m happy to talk with you about your father. About our family, if you like. Will you girls sit by the bridge with
me?”
“In this heat!” Linh protested.
She went to straighten his shirt collar. Seeing her aunt fuss over her family made Vivi ache. How many times had May committed
these small acts of caregiving for Tu?n? Laying a miniature soy sauce tin into his lunch box, wordlessly untying his boots at the back door because he struggled
with the laces after the accident. She offered him countless deeds of love, and he still lost himself.
“Evening is almost here,” Ki`êu said, touching his wife’s hand lightly with his own. “If they don’t mind the mosquitoes.”
“I don’t,” Vivi said immediately, then turned to her sister. “Button?”
Calla hesitated, pen dangling from her fingers. “Why don’t you go without me? I’m in the middle of something. And Khánh promised to let me drive her motorbike before dinner.”
Her sketches lay next to her in a pile on the floor, each portrait rendered with swift, dynamic strokes. Amid her eagerness
to get to know their relatives, Calla seemed to have forgotten that they’d come all that way for Tam. But Vivi saw her sister’s beseeching expression and gave in. One couldn’t force Calla to do something she didn’t want to.
“Fine,” Vivi said, suppressing her irritation. “You stay then. Don’t crash her bike.”
“Love you, mean it.”