Dragonfish: A Novel (13 page)

It made no sense. You were hardly five years old but had no fear of being on your own, of getting lost or hurt, of me punishing you. Each time I found you, I seized your arm and shook you and even threatened you, only to have you look up crossly at me as though I had interrupted something important. I began to wonder if you weren’t trying to escape me, or punish me for whatever it was I had done or hidden from you in my heart.

I finally asked you why you were doing this. I did not expect a real answer.

We were inside our hut, and you peered at the empty doorway and murmured to yourself, I was looking for Father.

A voice awoke me one night. I sat up and found everyone in the hut sound asleep.

You were snoring beside me. I had started tying rope from my ankle to yours, to alert me if you ever wandered away at night. I untied it and stepped outside to listen again for the voice.

I walked barefoot around the camp, beneath clear skies and a full moon. Rats the size of cats squeaked along the empty pathways. I heard a few faint voices from nearby huts, though none that sounded like the one that had awoken me. I was aware that I was following a sound from the depths of sleep, yet I felt compelled to hear it again, as if mute and searching for my own voice, and I continued walking
until I found myself outside the camp, headed slowly in the direction of the beach.

The sea was calm that night, lapping the empty shore and washing cool and soft over my ankles. I let the swirling sand bury my feet and looked out into the night, past the lonesome jetty, at the gray moonlit waters. Vietnam was somewhere out there. It might as well have been the moon.

A sound drifted toward me, like someone slowly paddling a boat. It was hours past curfew, so I thought at first that a patrol boat had spotted me. But all I saw was a dark figure about twenty meters out in the water, moving parallel to the shore. I started down the beach to get a closer look without wading in any deeper. I made out her long tangled hair, her white blouse drenched and clinging to her skin. The sea was up to her waist, and she was taking one long, slow stride after the other, dragging herself through the water with her head bowed, searching for something in the shallows.

She had not yet noticed me.

Are you okay? I called out to her. She brushed her hands across the surface of the water as though parting curtains.

I called her a second time. She turned around with a start.

Her long face was unmistakable, that howling still there in the stark eyes that regarded me now with outrage and eagerness. She began dragging herself toward me, rising out of the water with her small gray breasts visible beneath the translucent blouse and its neckline ripped and her hair dripping over those outraged eyes. And I saw again in my mind that flash of her head and arms, frozen forever in midair, when she stepped off the gunwale and plunged into the sea.

I wanted to run away, but my feet were planted in the sand.

She stopped about five meters from me. Have you seen my son? she said.

No, I said immediately. I wanted to tell her that he was alive and safe and probably asleep on the floating hospital moored somewhere out there in the darkness, but I was afraid she might make me take her there.

He’s just a little boy, she continued and shook her head. She gestured around her. I can’t seem to find him anywhere out here. Where could he be if he’s not out here?

How did you lose him?

She peered down the shore and said, It feels like forever ago. She started wading away, the water slashing her knees. But then she turned back around. She looked at me carefully. Are you sure you don’t know where he is?

I felt my heart beating again. I have no idea, I told her. I’m sure he’s okay.

Her face turned hard. She said, I don’t care if he’s okay. I left the world because of him and now I find he’s not here with me like he’s supposed to be? Tell me, is that fair?

I shook my head.

She waded away again, this time toward the rocky end of the shore.

What will you do if you find him? I called after her.

She looked over her shoulder, still moving, and said, I’m taking him with me. What else?

My feet shifted finally in the sand and I took a step forward. Wherever she was headed, her son would not be there. Yet I felt compelled to follow her, to see what she would do if she ever did find him. She seemed both terrible and beautiful in the moonlight.

I made the sign of the cross and watched her figure fade slowly into the night until all that was left was the distant sound of sloshing water.

You fell ill with the flu the next day. I brought you to the sick bay and they gave you medicine, but your fever got worse. You spent two days lying on your cardboard pallet, hardly eating a thing. Each time you awoke from a nap, you started crying for your father. No matter how I tried to soothe you, you kept mewling his name.

I understand it now, your love for him. He never scolded you as I did, never lifted his hand at you except to caress your head. In his brief time as your father, he took you on walks nearly every day, held you as you slept, even fed you at the dinner table though you were old enough to feed yourself.

But more than anything, I think you missed having him there when you were upset, to look upon you with eyes that forgave you all your tears, all your questions and sorrows. The moment he arrived in your life, despite being gone for most of it, he instantly filled a space that you had always reserved for him, for the promise of him, and he filled it with a devotion that he had already prepared in his heart before you were ever born. Perhaps that is the only way that true love can work, when it is prepared for and embraced without thought, without choice.

It struck me, while you were sick, that if I ever told you the truth, you would blame me and then hate me for not staying behind and letting him take my place.

Soon after you recovered, you disappeared again. While I was away at Mass one afternoon, you went out to the latrine and never came back. Our housemates offered to help find you, but I insisted on going alone. I was afraid my anger would betray me when I finally found you.

I searched all over the camp, every single place I’d ever caught you, including the waterfall where some man had recently fallen and broken his neck. I ended up at the beach, where I had to fight the impulse to grab every child who remotely resembled you.

I do not deserve this, I thought to myself, though it was still unclear what I did deserve.

A commotion soon interrupted my search. People began crowding the shore as yet another refugee boat came bobbing into the shallows, sunk by its occupants and slowly heeling as they jumped overboard and staggered, the healthy carrying the young and elderly, onto the beach.

I watched an exhausted man drag himself ashore with a frail old woman on his back and her arms locked so tightly around his neck that it seemed she was choking him and bringing him to his knees.

The prospect of you being lost forever washed over me then. It had never come to this, all those other times you disappeared. Perhaps my exasperation had numbed me to the panic, to the worry, because suddenly nothing mattered but that I never feel this way again. Never finding you was preferable to finding you dead or hurt. For the first time in my life, I could live with not knowing.

I thought of my encounter on the beach a few nights before, my vision, whatever it was. I had entirely forgotten it until that moment. It did not feel like a dream because I could hear again in my head her impatient voice, her bitterness.

Only then did I start walking toward the promontory. It had crossed my mind from the very beginning, but it still seemed incredible, you going there on your own. Perhaps the truth was that at that point I no longer wanted to find you at all. The closer I got, the less I knew what I would do if you were there. Was I to scold you yet again? Beat you until you stopped all this?

When I arrived and saw you sitting alone on the rocks below, I
was struck calm. I can’t say now if it was relief or disappointment. You were there waiting for Son, for something I couldn’t give you myself, and part of me wanted him to find you and take you away for good. Where to? I kept thinking. Where to?

I started slowly and quietly down the path. You were sitting on your haunches and glancing around yourself, unable to stay still, dissatisfied with your own company. I saw then what I had always been unwilling to see. Your likeness to me, as stark as the waters below. That’s when I stopped, about halfway down the path. Every part of me felt exhausted, heavy with surrender.

You hadn’t noticed me yet. You crawled to the edge of the rock and leaned over to peer at your reflection. You gazed at it for a long time, unable to look away, leaning closer and closer to it, until suddenly your hand slipped. Before you could cry out you had tumbled headfirst into the water.

How can I explain what happened next? It was as though I had stopped breathing. My mouth was open, but nothing came out. My arms tried to reach out for you, but they felt petrified like my legs and every other muscle in my body.

Your arms were flailing in the water, your white face breaking the surface before going under once, twice. I might have been holding my breath the entire time because my heart was exploding in my chest and thudding in my ears as your yelps pierced the air.

I must have closed my eyes at some point because a loud splash forced them open. You had drifted farther from the rock, but he was already under you with his arm wrapped around your chest and your face lifted above water. He swam to the rocks, heaved you onto them before dragging himself out of the water.

My legs were finally moving by then, as if thunderstruck into action, and I stumbled down the path, only to freeze again a few meters from him as he was turning you onto your side while you
gasped and coughed and cried all at once. I opened my mouth but did not know who to call out to. To you? To him? Was I now to pull you from his arms and hold you in mine, thank him as I wept over you, hoping he hadn’t seen what I had just done, what I had almost let happen? All I wanted was to close my eyes.

He looked up and saw me standing there, and his drenched face seized with recognition and then with a fury I’d only ever seen in a barking dog.

He left you there on the ground still crying and coughing and stormed up to me, and before I could step away he seized me by the arms and shook me and slapped me hard across the face. What is wrong with you, woman? he shouted and slapped me again. Open your goddamned eyes!

I took the blows blindly, feeling all at once the relief and the shame, the finality of what I had done, what I had failed to do. I felt his thick hands clutching my arms and my body weaken as I pressed my face against his chest and began to sob.

He let go of my arms. His chest stiffened. I expected him to push me away, and found myself sobbing harder when he did not. He must have thought me a madwoman, overcome by what I had nearly let happen to you. But I was not thinking of you at all. I was crying for myself, for everything I had lost, for your father, your ridiculous father, who would never hold me or forgive me anything ever again.

part
three

“S
HE
’
S MY WIFE
,” I said to the girl. “My ex-wife. You don’t know anyone named Suzy?”

She shook her head uncertainly, holding the edge of the door, half hidden behind it. She seemed caught between seeing me as someone with vital information and someone who’d knocked on the wrong door. Behind her, a column of light from the window sliced the dresser in half.

“Are you alone?” I said.

“Why are you asking?”

“You’re right—I’m sorry. I’m looking for Hong Thi Pham. I call her Suzy. Do you know her?”

She waited a beat before nodding knowingly, like she’d been waiting for me to say the name. She pronounced it in proper Vietnamese for me, surname first. “I don’t actually know her. But I know who she is. She’s my mother.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I see it.”

We exchanged a moment of quiet recognition, aware that we had each just discovered something profound. I was still too stunned by who she was, too distracted by who she looked like, to
know how exactly to act—trapped between a sentimental stirring inside me and dismay at her sudden existence in the world, which explained so many things about her mother at the same time as it explained nothing.

“Is this her room?”