Dragonfish: A Novel (22 page)

I looked at the tower, its neon-red antennae piercing the thick clouds. I was shaking my head, but I wasn’t sure at what.

“What if she ends up disappearing too?” Mai persisted. “This might be our only chance to talk to her. You want to risk losing your only chance to find out the rest of the story?”

“What rest of the story?”

“You haven’t figured it out yet. She’s the woman Sonny was having an affair with. She’s my mother’s best friend—her
only
friend—and yet my mother goes to Victor for help instead of her?”

Mai had turned on her other blinker, and her eyes flickered at me with certainty now—with enthusiasm. I thought of how her stubbornness was a kind of fearlessness, a reveling in the unknown.

We tumbled out of the parking lot and onto Paradise Road. I was clenching the Jeep’s grab bar. It had never crossed my mind that Happy might be involved with Sonny, but deeper than my shock was the suspicion that I’d been wrong about this and possibly many other things.

“Some best friend,” Mai said as she steered us toward the Stratosphere.

“I should’ve known,” I muttered, though I suspected it would always baffle me why that stupid woman—or any woman—would take up with a man like Sonny.

part
four

This man who once saved your life, he is not a bad man. Nor a good one. I have long given up on what it means exactly to be either, but I am confident now that you must know one to know the other. Perhaps this is the other reason why I’ve often thought of him alongside your father. You did too, long ago.

How it turned out then that he, who saved you, ruined me is something I must also explain to you, except I don’t know how. It feels like it happened twice without me knowing it. Even as I sit here writing these words decades later, a world away in America, in a desert far from the sea, I am still living on that island where he first met me and I first came to need him. Everything that has happened since seems a shadow of what happened there. Even everything that has led me here to this quiet room.

But let me say one thing. Let me write it down so that it will never again be a question in my own mind. If I have suffered, it has been because of myself. I blame nothing and no one else.

The Sunday after he fished you out of the ocean, I took you to Mass at the island chapel, and during communion I remained seated,
abstaining for the first time in my life. You wouldn’t stop looking at me, confused that I wasn’t doing something you’d always seen me do. You had no understanding yet of the sacraments and how communion is only for those in a state of grace. You had no idea that days before I had closed my eyes while the ocean was swallowing you whole.

I watched communion end and realized that no priest or prayer or ritual could ever make things right, not because what I did was unforgivable but because forgiveness suddenly meant nothing to me. As we walked home afterward, I felt a lightness inside, like an absence, as though some spirit had burrowed into me and then burrowed back out, taken part of me with it and left me unrecognizable to myself.

We passed the junk woman who roamed the camp asking for people’s discards and sold them out of two plastic milk crates at the market. I reached into my pocket for the jade rosary, your father’s first gift to me, and was ready to hand it over to her, but then I remembered that you had taken it from my limp hands during Mass. You were now holding it, wrapped around your palm, as you rummaged through the woman’s crate of empty jars and mismatched sandals. The woman gave me a disapproving look, nodding at you, and remarked that rosaries weren’t toys, but I paid her no mind.

You picked up a dusty red book and flipped through its blank pages. It was a journal. Only the first three pages had handwriting.

Mother woke up coughing this morning
, the first sentence read,
and it was raining so she called for me to open the window.

I bought the journal and brought it home with us. Although I’d been a reader all my life, I’d never written anything outside of a few letters to my sister when your father and I lived in Pleiku. It seemed strange now to write something to myself, for myself. So I turned
to the first blank page and began an overdue letter to my mother. I could get no further than a description of our hut. I started a letter to my sister but managed only a halfhearted greeting. Finally, I wrote down your father’s name. Only then did the words come.

An hour later, I had written six pages, recounting random stories from my youth that were unknown to him, things that had happened when he was in prison, thoughts I never shared with him because I did not know how. Every word, however, instead of bringing me closer to him, moved me further away, so that it also seemed I was writing stories about someone else, a letter to a stranger about another stranger.

I think it was then that I stuffed the jade rosary into the cigar box, where it would remain for almost twenty years.

I sought out Son that afternoon. I left you in the care of our housemates and went to Zone A, where I’d heard he and his son lived.

It took over an hour and cost me some suspicious looks from people I asked, but I finally found their hut. The boy was sitting outside on a large tree stump, his back to me. He was peering up at the hilltop where the bell from the Buddhist temple had been tolling only minutes before. Midday chants now filled the air from a lone monk somewhere in the trees, and the boy was listening with his hands in his lap.

I remained still until the chants ended. When he stood from the stump and saw me, he withdrew a step. I’d only ever seen him from a distance at the promontory, and I noticed now how handsome he already was, much more so than his father, who seemed hewn out of stone. He must have been no older than eight at the time.

I asked him if his father was there. He said, No ma’am. Then I asked if his father had gone fishing, and recognition flickered in his
eyes. Perhaps he had seen us at the promontory after all. He said, My father never tells me where he goes.

I took a step closer, smiling as best I could, and asked if he was hungry and showed him my plastic bag. It contained three eggs, a can of sardines, and a baguette.

Let me fry some eggs for you, I said. Your father did something kind for me the other day, and I want to thank him. Do you have a pan?

The boy considered my face for a moment as if searching for a reason to distrust me. Finally he said, Yes, ma’am.

Inside their tiny hut, a fishing net turned hammock hung above a bed built expertly out of tree bark and planks from the sunken refugee boats. I remembered being impressed by that bed, by the cardboard box of neatly folded clothes beside it, and by their dirt floor, which looked swept, even around the stone fire pit. Atop the stones was their frying pan. I noticed no cross on the walls, no Buddha or altar or anything.

I fried the eggs with the sardines and made two sandwiches out of the baguette. I watched the boy carefully eat one sandwich as he sat on the bed.

I said, That monk chanting . . . it’s very nice, isn’t it? So beautiful and calm.

He finished chewing and swallowed before saying, Yes, ma’am. I listen every afternoon. He was about to take another bite but then added, as if pointing out something pleasant, It sounds like the dead are singing.

His sincerity startled me and I found myself smiling. I wrapped the other sandwich in newspaper and said, This one is for your father. Please tell him I came by, the woman with the little girl he helped.

He won’t like that you were here.

He won’t? Then why did you let me in?

You asked if I was hungry, and I was. You wouldn’t have left anyway. I saw it in your face.

He was speaking matter-of-factly, almost kindly, but it still felt like an accusation.

Tell him I insisted on coming in, I said. And that this sandwich is my only way of thanking him. I’ll stop by again tomorrow afternoon, and he can yell at me then.

I left before the boy could protest, but as I was walking away from the hut, I heard him call me from the doorway. He was holding his half-eaten sandwich.

My father didn’t mean to hurt you the other day, he said. He just didn’t know how scared you were. I saw my mother drown at sea, and there was nothing I could do either.

Many months later, after you and I arrived in the States and came to live with your father’s uncle in Los Angeles, I saw the boy at a grocery store. It had to have been him. He was alone in the canned soup aisle, looking through the shelves. It took me a moment to realize that he was actually rearranging them, lining up the cans and turning the labels face-out as though it was his job. There was so much purpose on his face.

I was at the other end of the aisle and thought about approaching him to say hello, at least to make sure that it was really him, but then his father’s voice somewhere nearby, calling for him, made my heart jump. I rushed away and told your granduncle I had a headache and went to wait outside in the car.

The boy and his father, I knew, had also been sponsored to Los Angeles. For months after that encounter, until the day I finally left for good, I looked for them every time I stepped into a grocery store.

The following afternoon I found them both asleep, Son in the hammock and the boy on the bed. Son’s eyes opened a moment after I stepped inside the doorway.

I’ve brought you all some pork, I said. My bag also contained a bunch of spinach and fresh garlic and ginger.

He sat up in his hammock. Go cook for your daughter, he said. I don’t need you to thank me.

The boy was awake now and peering at my bag. For the two months they’d been at the camp, they had probably eaten nothing but fish. The Malaysians, mostly Muslim, outlawed pork in the camp, but I had bought some that morning from smugglers who secretly visited the island every week. I traded in one of three gold rings that I had sewn into the waistband of my pants, and still had enough money to make a week of meals. As many as it would take.

I avoided Son’s eyes and asked the boy for their ration of fish sauce and rice. He turned to his father, whose only response was to climb down from the hammock and walk past me out of the hut.

I sliced the pork and sautéed it in fish sauce with ginger and some salt and sugar, stir-fried the spinach with garlic, and made rice. I fixed a bowl for the boy and told him to eat, then prepared a second bowl. The smell brought your father’s ghost into the hut. I had to hold back my tears when the boy looked up, chopsticks in hand, and asked me if I wasn’t going to eat with him.

Outside, Son was sitting on the tree stump and whittling a long bamboo pole to fish with. He didn’t look up until I was standing beside him. With his small knife, he gestured at the bowl of food in my hands and said, I don’t know what was wrong with you that day, and I don’t care. Maybe God or whoever cares but I don’t, so doing all this makes no difference to me.

He returned to his whittling. He would have been thirty-one at the time, and I twenty-four, both of us impossibly young it seems to me now, though in that moment I could see that we had each aged years in a matter of months.

I set the bowl of food beside him on the stump. Anh Son, I said and waited for him to look up. You lost your wife and I have lost my husband. I am here to help us forget that for a little while.

I brought you with me the following day. Neither Son nor the boy appeared surprised. The boy made room for you to sit on the bed, right beneath his father who remained in his hammock, staring at the ceiling as you stared at the cocoon of his body above your head. Only the boy watched me as I cooked lunch.