The Lotus and the Storm (42 page)

As Phong sat here beside my bed so many years later, holding me inside his gaze, our deep ties suspended between the banal and the profound, I gave him what he sought. I opted for a resumption of normal existence devoid of howling recriminations and judgments. The moment I tipped toward one, the possibility of the other vanished.

He touched my hand. He was giving me the power to forgive or not forgive him. I closed my eyes and nodded. He knew I had seen into his depths. And that in so seeing him, I did not turn away. Yielding to faith, I gave him the gift of acknowledgment instead. And just like that, almost simultaneously, I felt it too, as if the gift were equally mine.

We will go our separate ways, but for now, in the lowering light, he remained by my bedside. And for once, I look not forward but deeply inward. I am nothing as simple as happy but I am here, inhabiting fully this moment in which I am unburdened at last.

BAO, 2006

I
t is one week after Uncle Number Two's visit. Mai and I are with our father. The dimmer switch in the room is turned low. I hear his phlegmy breaths and gasps for air.

We put on Chopin for him. In the beginning, the notes are soft and subtle and like water, rippling in cross rhythms with the right hand playing semiquavers against the left's fluent triplets. The arpeggios console and haunt, pulling the gathering shade of evening into a room already filled with much reflection.

Our father is lying demurely curled under the blanket, but I can tell he is following these most aching and ethereal of notes. Those played by the right hand carry the melodious but more punctuated tune. Those played by the left hand carry the profound inner ellipses rippling ever so softly, barely audible though ever present and ever felt. His fingers grip the sheet. Occasionally he lifts his hands when the music swells, as if to feel the pleasure in his fingers. He lets out a murmur. His mouth turns and makes a smile as he drifts into a deep sleep. The lamp at his bedside casts a benevolent glow.

Mai pulls her chair close to the light and reads papers from her briefcase. She looks at him warmly once it is clear to her he has fallen asleep.

At the moment when dusk shifts into the twilight of evening, everything, even the space between objects, is subtly transformed. I feel the surface of my skin come alive. I touch him and feel an immediate response—despite his heavy eyelids, his eyes pop open and he gives me a purposeful look.

He utters a single word. Quy.

Of course.

With superstitious dread, I reach for his hand. His face registers my presence as he turns over his palm to receive mine. His body is briefly unsettled by a momentary twinge and then he is gone.

I stay seated, his hand still in mine. I can feel a single, continuing squeeze pressed against my palm.

Just a few days ago, when Mai and I arrived, he had coyly whispered, “I want to go.” Mai had thought he was referring to some local destination. But after so many hours listening to him at his bedside, I knew what he meant.

But still my face dropped. He had added a quick, conciliatory corrective—“I am ready”—to soften the message, removing it from the realm of will and desire.

“I have lived a long life,” he later said. Unlike my sister's, his departure will be as nature intended.

I look around. His belongings are here, outlasting him. The paratrooper's red beret is close by, within easy reach on the night table. I keep quiet and think of his death as something that occupies only a narrow band. I remember his life instead, with its boundless variations that are undepleted by death.

Mai is still there, oblivious, reading in a pool of light. Visitors in adjoining rooms come and go. A phone rings. A voice whispers into a cupped receiver. Shoes shuffle in the hallway. A bucket scrapes against the floor outside and then a mop is pushed here and there. His death hasn't been registered yet. It is not a surprise, yet the irrevocable loss leaves me distressed. When the nursing home discovers what has happened, the institutional particulars of death—paperwork, death certificates, funeral details—will overshadow our private sorrow.

 • • • 

In a box hidden under his bed are piles of envelopes, organized in reverse chronological order. Mai reaches for the first pack, held together by a rubber band. The top envelope is dated 2006 and postmarked from a city in New York.

“I don't understand,” she says softly. She flips through the others, all identically marked. For a moment she does not recognize the name, despite its familiarity. John Clifford. It is Cliff, of course. As a child, we heard him referred to only as Cliff. There was no need for a last name. When we arrived in America years later and she searched for him, the matter of the missing last name kept her from finding him. Our father had rebuffed repeated inquiries.

But Cliff has been within reach all along. For years he has apparently been sending these envelopes to our father. For years our father has hidden this fact from Mai and me. And yet his baffling absence has been no absence at all.

There is one check inside each envelope, every one uncashed. Still, the checks kept coming. Offers and rejections exchanged month after month. Sometimes there is a note attached to the check, written with a forced breeziness that makes it all the more poignant. On a piece of neatly folded paper, he wrote, “Would be nice to see you and catch up,” “Call when you can,” or “It has been a long time.” For years, then, it is our father who has maintained our separation.

Until a few months ago, that is. Amid the piles of uncashed checks, there is an index card with a brief note addressed to our father that makes my stomach lurch. “To my dear friend, As you requested, here is a check for $30,000.” I recognize Cliff's handwriting from the other letters he sent our father. Mai stretches her back. She is groping for answers. I imagine what might have happened. With willed composure, our father, normally distant and pursed-lipped, had to approach his old, long-abandoned friend to ask for money to give to Aunt An. My throat feels parched and raw. The wonder of it. The heavy seesaw of life, tipping this way, then that. Mai's grave bearing shows that she too is astonished by this discovery.

Of course, I think to myself. Our father shares a long history with Aunt An and understands who she is to us all, here in this country. She has been for me the mother I lost so many years ago.

Of course we will do whatever we can, Mai and I, to continue to help Aunt An, especially now that our father has passed away.

When she finds our father's life insurance policy in another box, we both know, our heart rising, that we will turn the proceeds over to Aunt An. For the first time in a while, I feel a cumbersome affinity with Mai.

It is a complicated feeling, threaded in a simultaneous fusion and fission. The heavy, surly grayness that keeps me separated from her, the two of us colliding and commingling but each of us essentially splintered from and hostile to the other, has lifted momentarily. The space between us closes up a bit.

I am across a great distance lurching toward her. I watch as she approaches Mrs. An, who is more wounded by our father's death than I had thought possible. Her eyes are ringed by sadness. She is at the nurses' aides' station, poring over medical notebooks and records.

“Aunt An,” Mai says. I will take my turn as well but for now I let her start the conversation.

Aunt An looks up in a daze. She turns slightly, offering us a glimpse of her sallow profile. She intuits that there is a serious conversation about to ensue. She puts down her pen and gives Mai her attention. “My father was worried about your situation before he died. It is clear that he wanted you to be all right. Your well-being mattered much to him.”

Aunt An's face, overlaid with worries, softens. “And his to me,” she says. “I cared for him as well as I could. I tried to make him comfortable.”

Mai nods. I want to have my say too. I push her aside and take Aunt An's elbow for emphasis. “My father had a life insurance policy. Once I collect on it, I will turn the proceeds over to you,” I explain. My hoarse voice identifies me to her. She looks at
me
. I am certain she can tell I am Bao. I use concepts—Vietnamese concepts—that Mai would not invoke.
“Mang on,”
I say. “Wearing a debt.” The family owes Aunt An so much for what she has done for Father. I enumerate everything she did for him, and in so doing, let her know that I remember. “You washed him. You fed him. You comforted him. Take it with the family's gratitude. Take it for your son,” I insist.
“Lam on,”
meaning “please,” but not just please.
Lam on
means make good karma and take it. The Vietnamese implication is that she would be doing us a favor by allowing us to give her the money and, in the process, giving us an opportunity to create positive karma for ourselves.

Aunt An is touched but I see that she doesn't think this is right. To soften her reluctance, I put the offer in purely Vietnamese terms. As the child of my father, I am turning the money over to her for what she did for him. As the mother of her own child, she will take the money for his sake. There is no shame. Only following a path, a virtuous cycle.

“I know your son has had problems,” I say as I put my arms around her. “Give yourself a cushion so you can help him.”

At last Aunt An speaks. We are holding hands. Tears blur her face and mine. We walk to Father's still unoccupied room. Aunt An sobs and I can make out only part of what she is saying. “He has been through so much. He's lost and needs to set himself straight.” Touched by Mai's (and my) insistence, Aunt An opens up. The armored demeanor softens. “Bad men were after him. I had to have the
hui
money first,” she tearfully confesses. “They carried guns. Made threats.”

We cluster around Father's bed as if he were still here.

“I will show you where to get him help.” Mai reemerges and intervenes. I am grateful she has a steady salary, a law degree, and no debt. I know what she has been thinking. She commiserates. But more than that, she will cut through the patchwork emotions and take it upon herself to deal with the business of the
hui.
She says, tentatively, “If you are comfortable with it, I can talk to Mrs. Chi also. She should not malign you and your son to others.”

Aunt An lifts her face and presents a look of bafflement, as if to ask, “What can you do?”

Aunt An puts a restraining hand on Mai's wrist but Mai continues with gentle determination. “Aunt An, please listen. Of course no one can change what Mrs. Chi and the
hui
gang think but we can do something about what they say about you. They've smeared you and you've been so hurt.”

Her voice has taken on a sanctioned, professional tone. She explains that spreading untruths about someone can serve as grounds for a slander lawsuit. Aunt An has made all her
hui
payments on time, so saying otherwise is an untruth.

Aunt An is surprised that gossip, long a culturally freighted part of the
hui,
meant to keep members in line, can actually be a legally recognized wrong. A tort, Mai explains with authority. Aunt An has the right to sue for slander and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

Aunt An, wide-eyed and fearing the language of law and its promises of rights, gasps. “Don't worry. You don't actually have to sue. But a hint that you might will be enough to make Mrs. Chi stop,” Mai declares.

Aunt An gulps and then nods blearily. “I won't worry,” she says. She resettles herself and gives me a long, slow motherly embrace as a soft light shines through the uncurtained window.

 • • • 

As far as our father's death is concerned, we keep everything simple. He had never been a man prone to pomp and circumstance. But simplicity certainly can accommodate the presence of an old friend. That Cliff can be reached so easily startles me. Uncle Number Two merely picked up the phone and told him of our father's death. Of course he would come immediately, on the next flight out. He had been wrongly pushed onto the margins and at the first invitation he will return to the center.

He arrives at our apartment several minutes early. When Mai opens the door, he moves toward her and gives her a big warm hug. The connection from so many years ago catches and holds. His eyes squeeze shut. For a moment it is as if we are all irrevocably back in another time. Cliff has returned, and he is the fixed point we can revolve around. Cliff is here, luxuriating in our presence, imposing order, and I almost expect our mother too to materialize beside him, where she used to be.

I am haunted by that absence even now. A person arriving reminds me of someone who is not. There is no pure sensation, only an overlapping, mingled one.

“You have grown. It has been a long time.” He smiles. He is in much better health than our father was before his death. Age has not shrunken him. He has retained his soldierly bearing. His hair has turned white, but the green in his eyes has only deepened. Thirty years later, with surprising agility, he has returned—an edifice of our imagination.

“Quite a long time,” he says, repeating the obvious. “But I can still see the old you.”

He and Mai move to the living room and sit shoulder to shoulder on the sofa, held together in a soft, bluish light.

“Cliff,” she says. She calls him by his name. Something opens up between them, in a vague, nascent way, but enough to illuminate their togetherness. “Why did it take so long?”

“Your father had his reasons,” Cliff answers. He leans back and loosens his tie. He is apologetic. He is hurt. He wants to make sense of the lapse but he does not want to blame. “I did come down to see him while you were in school once. He asked me not to make any more contact. Especially not with you.”

“But why?”

Cliff nods. “He wanted to protect you. So you could make a new life and not be tangled up in the past.”

“But he considered you a friend,” Mai insists.

A silence passes. “Friendship can be complicated.”

He does not say what I have always suspected, that his presence reminds our father of insufficiency and defeat. And betrayal. And broken promises.

For her part, Mai is unsure how far she wants to venture into “complicated” territory. She points to the arrangement of buns and rolls she has ordered from a Vietnamese restaurant and then goes to the refrigerator to get him a cold “33” beer. She takes a deep breath. “Do you think . . . ?” She trails off and rephrases the question. “Why do you think it was complicated?”

She feels an inner tug that is strong and dogged. I feel the same.

“Your sister's death made it complicated.”

Mai simply nods as if she understands. In this most pivotal of moments, Mai is silent, her appearance controlled, and her calm is impregnable. I want her to push against the mundanity of their words, to probe. I try to thread my way through her thoughts.