The Time in Between (25 page)

“Is it you?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said, and she felt the slight vibration of his chest against the heel of her hand.

“I thought it was some small animal.”

“I am some small animal.”

She had unbuttoned his shirt. His chest was smooth and hairless.

“I was watching over you,” he said. “Like those angels in fairy tales. Not the dark angels who carry you away to the other side, but the other, safer angels.” He paused, and she could feel his chest rise and fall. “I thought that if I watched you long enough you would wake up. And that is what happened.”

She did not invite him under the netting. The thin gauze between them made her braver, and she touched under his arms and felt his throat; it was just as she had imagined. She unbuckled his belt and, with one hand, tugged at his pants. He lifted his hips, and in doing so brushed against her wrist and she moved her hand across him. She came out from under the netting and lay alongside him, trying to touch as much of her flesh to his as she could. His ankles, insteps, the thin legs. He did not move, did not speak. She straddled him in the darkness, and when their mouths met she discovered that he was not a very good kisser. Or that he did not like it. She tasted alcohol.

She placed her hand lightly over his eyes. Felt the movement of his eyelids. “Can you see me?”

He shook his head.

“Touch me, then.”

He took a long time to come. Perhaps it was the alcohol, perhaps his age, perhaps fatigue. Vu fell asleep curled against her bum. They were under the mosquito net together. He snored lightly, his left arm twitched. Ada was wet between her legs but she didn’t want to fuss with the lamp and look for a bathroom in the dark. She did not fall asleep until the sky began to lighten beyond the dirty window.

When she woke, Vu was gone. She put on a T-shirt and jeans and wandered the second floor in search of a toilet. She found only empty rooms and eventually went downstairs and used the small bathroom off the kitchen. It was a squat toilet, quite dirty. She hugged her knees and stared at the plastic pail in the corner. A cockroach migrated from the pail to the drain. She heard movement in the kitchen. When she came out of the toilet, she saw a young boy who wore only shorts, standing before a single gas burner. He was stirring something in a large pot. He turned toward Ada when she left the bathroom. He said, “Hello, how are you?”

“Good morning,” Ada said.

The boy said that his name was Nhat. He was thirteen years old and Chi was his father. He lived with his mother, but he came here every morning to cook his father’s breakfast. He waved at the pot. “Would you like some?”

Ada declined. She said that Nhat spoke very good English.

“There are more than two ways to skin a cat,” Nhat said. He dipped his head and scooped whatever was in the pot into a bowl.

Ada went upstairs. Her little bag with its meager belongings lay yawning on the floor. She was light-headed and shaky. She sat on the floor and recalled that Vu, just before he came, had grasped the hair at her crown and pulled her head backward and, after, he had kissed her neck and described how it looked in the dim light of the moon. And now, in the brilliant light of day, he had disappeared.

When she arrived back in the kitchen, she asked Nhat if he had seen Vu.

“Hoang Vu is my uncle. He drove away.”

“When will he be back?”

Nhat said that he didn’t know. “I am sorry,” he said. “My father is upstairs.”

Ada pretended nonchalance. She ate a banana and sat in the front room looking at the doorway and the light that spilled onto the warped floor. She walked outside into the courtyard. Someone was sweeping leaves in the neighbor’s yard. Voices, the yelp of a puppy, cry of a small child.

She bought bread from an old woman passing by the front street on her bicycle and ate it sitting on the porch, looking out across to the welder’s shop beyond the trellis of Chi’s yard. When Chi finally came downstairs, he said good morning. He was dressed in shorts and a large black T-shirt. His legs were stubby and bruised. He smiled and bowed slightly. “Vu went into town early.”

He sat beside her and ate an orange. He said, “Vu is a lucky man. It has always been that way for him. He is full of luck. He survived the war. Then he became a painter and has done very well. People admire him. Now he has you.”

“And there will be others after me.”

“Perhaps.”

Ada said that she didn’t believe in luck. She said that whatever happened, happened. This might be called fate or it might be called luck, or it might be fact. She preferred to think of it as fact.

Chi said that might be true some of the time. He rose, breathing heavily, and walked into the kitchen. Ada heard him sharpening a knife. The blade against the whetstone and then the shuffling of his feet as he moved out into the yard. After a few moments a high-pitched squeal of a pig came from the courtyard and it did not abate. She rose and went and looked out into the courtyard. The son, Nhat, had tied the pig’s feet and was sitting on its side, as if it were a hassock. Ada stood just inside the doorway and shuddered slightly. She wanted to but did not leave. She did not turn away.

Chi took a plastic pail and held it under the pig’s neck. There was a black wire looped around the pig’s snout. Nhat pulled on the wire and forced the snout back as Chi pushed the blade of the knife into the animal’s throat. Ada heard the tearing of flesh. A thin rope of blood hit Chi’s chest. The pig bucked and the boy rode him. The screams were higher now and they filled the courtyard like some ancient and infernal call. Ada wanted to cover her ears but she didn’t; she knew that Chi was watching her. The pig sang and with each sucking squeal a fresh rope of blood arced out over the ground. Gradually, the howls became muted and muffled and then, quickly, as if a curtain had fallen across the scene, the pig died. Chi castrated the pig. He held up the testicles for Ada to see, grinned, said, “Very large,” and threw them into the bucket of blood. Then he cut off the pig’s head with a rusty saw while the boy held the ears. Chi’s arms and legs were bloody.

Ada felt dizzy and her breath came in quick gulps. She turned away and walked back into the house and stood in the large front room. She could hear Chi and his son talking. They laughed. She tried to remember what Vu’s hands felt like. She imagined a white room with a bed and clean sheets and a window that offered a view of a perfectly clear sky. She went to the toilet and washed her hands and face, and when she was done she smelled her hands. Upstairs in the room she’d slept in she gathered her things and then wrote Vu a note telling him that she was sorry. She told him not to worry, she would get back to Danang on her own. Then she went downstairs and out through the front door and onto the street, and she began to walk.

She knew the direction of the train station, but she did not know how far it was. She walked for about an hour, past roadside cafés and small factories, and then she entered a confusion of cars and bicycles and trucks, and a man on a motorcycle called out,
You,
and then again,
You,
until she turned to him and cried, “I do not know you.” He laughed and drove away. She bent her head and carried on, watching her feet as they moved, aware that a window had been flung open onto a view of an alien and foreign place, and then, just as suddenly, it had closed.

The road was straight but at some point she turned left and then right and then left and so on until she halted, breathless, and held her arm out for the next available cyclo. It arrived, at its helm a boy who seemed not to have the strength to pedal her. But he did. Out of the bedlam of the streets and on toward the station, where the ticket master told her that the train to Danang would leave almost immediately.

WHEN SHE GOT BACK TO HER HOTEL IN DANANG, THE DESK CLERK handed her two messages. The first was from Elaine Gouds, who said that she would be at Christy’s the following evening around eight and if Ada was available, she should join her. The second message was from Jon. He had called and left his number in Hanoi. She phoned him immediately, but no one picked up, and when the answering machine cut in and she heard a voice with a slight European accent, she hung up.

She tried once more a little later, and again there was no answer, but this time she left a message. She said she wanted to go back home. She wanted him to come back to Danang. “Please,” she said, and she hung up. After, she looked at the phone thinking that if for some reason this wasn’t the right number, how ridiculous she must have sounded.

Late that night Jon phoned. Ada asked if he had gotten her message. Before she could say anything else he told her that she should visit Hanoi. His voice was light and cheerful. “For a few days at least,” he said. “It’s done me good. It might do you some good. There’s Lenin Park, and the old quarter’s great. It’s a fascinating city. We can go back to Danang together after.” He went on to explain he was staying with someone who worked for the UN. “He’s a Dutch man a friend in Vancouver told me about. In case we needed something. Andries. I don’t know if he has room in his apartment but maybe I can find you a hotel nearby. How are you doing, Ada?”

She thought of the answers she could give, that she was lonely, that she had just come from Hue and had spent the train trip fighting off a dread that had left her breathless, or that she needed Jon right at that moment, but she said none of this and instead told him she would call him in a few days, and she hung up.

THE SKY AT NOON WAS WHITE AND THEN A FAINT BLUE APPEARED and by late afternoon a pinkness had arrived, washing down to the tops of the trees. She had spent the day aimlessly on the rooftop, and now when she stood to go down to prepare for her meeting with Elaine, her figure cast a long shadow across the rooftop. In her room she poured some scotch and sipped at it as she thought about what she should wear. She chose a dark short skirt and a sleeveless top, and then put on some makeup by the dim light of the bathroom mirror. She wanted Elaine to see her as strong, as someone neither given to nor swayed by petty judgments.

Elaine was alone at a table that overlooked the harbor. She was drinking tea. When she saw Ada she smiled and lifted a hand in greeting, and as soon as Ada sat down, she said, “Look, the other night at Thanh’s. I’m sorry.” Her long fingers worked at a napkin, smoothed it on her lap, plucked it up again. “Married people do that sometimes. Have their outbursts that should be private but unfortunately aren’t.”

She seemed tired, her face was more delicate than usual. She touched it now, narrow index finger with a bright red nail. It was her eyes as well. More furtive, but some other quality, as if she expected to see herself reflected in others.

Ada waved a hand as if to dismiss Elaine’s concerns and then said that she had had a good time at Thanh’s. Jane had been sweet and Sammy was adorable.

“Isn’t he?” Elaine said, too brightly. Then she said that she was determined to salvage something from this experience in Vietnam. “I will not run.” She called over the waiter and ordered a plate of shrimp. Ada asked for a Coke.

Elaine said that she and Jack knew an American doctor in Hanoi who had lived in Southeast Asia for many years and whose wife had just died in a car accident. A horrible thing. They had two young boys. “And this man is planning on staying in Hanoi,” Elaine said. “Most of us might throw up our hands and go home, but he’s staying. I admire that. The tenacity, the bravery, even the foolishness.” She paused and then said, “I want to be brave like that.”

“You are,” Ada said. “I look at you and I see bravery.”

Ada wasn’t sure if this was true, but she knew that Elaine was pleased because she shook her head and smiled.

“You were away,” Elaine said.

“I went to Hue,” Ada said. “Coming down through the pass on my way back, I kept imagining my father on that same train. I remember you told me that you took that trip with him.”

“Yes,” Elaine said. Then she said, as if this were a sudden revelation, that after that trip, she had not seen Charles again, though she had tried. “He believed something about me that he wanted to protect me from.” She leaned forward to take a cigarette from Ada’s pack.

“Here,” Ada said, and offered Elaine a light. She saw the small mole on Elaine’s jaw. Almost imperceptible. The clean skin, the tiny flaw. Ada felt both empathy and aversion.

Elaine exhaled and said, “Your father was lost to himself. I think I recognized this in him.” She turned to gaze out at the harbor and then said softly that she had heard Jon was in Hanoi. Thanh had told her. She smiled slightly and said, “Thanh keeps me informed.” She said, “At Thanh’s the other day, when I saw Jon’s hands, I was amazed. He has Charles’s hands. Exactly.”

Ada said that Jon wanted her to go to Hanoi but she was thinking she wanted to go home. She said she thought she had been trying to find something that was still out there.

Elaine sat up straighter and said, “Who’s the brave one now?” She put out her cigarette, then took a shrimp, slid the plate toward Ada, and said, “Your father told me once that he wanted to go to Hanoi. He didn’t say why.” Ada was suddenly aware that her father had revealed little to Elaine about himself. They might have talked, might even have been lovers, but Elaine Gouds did not truly know Charles Boatman.

“In his bag there was a ticket to Hanoi,” Ada said. “But it had expired.” She lifted her shoulders, conscious of the pointlessness of the comment. Elaine called the waiter over and ordered a rum and Coke. “Join me?” she asked Ada and then called out to the waiter, “Make it two.”

When their drinks arrived, Elaine again mentioned Hanoi. She said that she knew a family who had returned to Australia for several months. “They have a house in Hanoi. It’s in a suburb near the zoo. Sammy loves it. There’s a small lake there, the streets are quiet. Before you leave, if you decide to go there and need a place to stay, let me know and I will try to arrange it.” She smiled. Lifted her glass and drank, as if cheered by the prospect of someone else’s plans.

AT NIGHT, ADA WOKE TO THE BELLOW OF A SHIP FAR OUT AT SEA and the reply of a foghorn. She got up and went to the bathroom. When she wiped herself she saw blood. This relieved her; she had been careless with Vu, giving no consideration to any consequences. She put in a tampon and went back to bed. She lay with her eyes open and thought that the following day she would go see Vu and tell him she was returning to Canada.