“Is this her room?”
“I don’t know. I guess so.” The girl glanced behind her as if to check that the room was still empty. “I was told to come here. Why are you looking for her?”
“She’s been missing from home since Sunday. Her car is gone, so we think she left on her own, but she didn’t tell anyone. Who told you to come here?”
“She did. She’s been sending me letters.” Her demeanor hardened suddenly like she was remembering herself, and she narrowed her eyes. “Look, I’m sure you are who you are, but I don’t know you any more than I know her. Shit, a month ago I didn’t even know she was alive. Now I’m here in an empty hotel room for God knows what reason.”
“Hey, it’s okay. Here, let me show you something. I’m just going for my wallet.”
I pulled out an old photo of me and Suzy at Fisherman’s Wharf, our backs to the ocean. We were a week away from getting married. Though I was beaming with my arm around her, her face was as solemn as the gray skies behind us. Smiling in pictures made her feel fake. We smile for who?
It came back to me then — how awkward and cold she’d get around children, how she’d always refuse when people offered their baby to her to hold, how adamant she’d been when I mentioned kids just a month before this photo was taken. She would have been about ten years older than the girl was now.
She held the photo close to her face and momentarily forgot me. That stirring inside me, I realized, was an outlandish urge to protect her. She had her mother’s beauty, except hers was distracted and uncertain: her chewed nails, her scuffed cowboy boots, the Rosemary’s Baby haircut framing her crinkled brow.
“You even stand the same way she does,” I said. “Here—” I handed her my driver’s license. “My name is Robert Ruen. Your mother and I were married for eight years. We lived in Oakland. It’s where I met her.”
“Guess she never told you about me. Why would she, right?”
“I’m sorry. I’m sure she had her reasons.”
“Don’t we all?” She gave me back my license. “Someone should apologize to you too.” She opened the door a little wider now. “You came all the way from Oakland to look for her?”
“She moved here a couple years ago. After our divorce. Her new husband here. . I’m helping him find her.”
I could see more questions popping into the girl’s head. She said, “Is she in trouble?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I’m here.”
“But how did you know to come to this room?”
“It’s a long story. You mind if I come inside?”
She glared at me like she was trying to peer into my soul, but there was also an eagerness in the way she pursed her lips and tapped her fingers on the door. She finally held it open for me.
The room was identical to mine. It was made up, pristine, no sign whatsoever that anyone had been here except for the girl’s purse on the dresser.
I asked her, “Were the curtains open or drawn when you came in?”
“Drawn. Had to let in some light. The rooms in these old casinos feel like tombs.”
I walked to the far wall without showing myself in the window and pulled the curtains close, plunging us into the room’s bronze light. I clicked on another lamp. She stood in the hall by the door, still holding my photo in her hand, thoroughly intrigued by all the stealth. I noticed a piece of paper by her purse, the one I had slid under the door. It must have mystified her until I came knocking and hollering. And even then.
“Listen,” I said, “I’m as confused by everything as you are. But before I tell you what I know, I need to ask you some questions. Is that okay?”
“You’re a cop, aren’t you?”
“I am?”
“You talk like one. No offense. I’ve run into a few cops in my life.”
“I guess you have. Don’t worry, you’ve done nothing wrong.”
“I know. That’s not what I’m worried about.” She approached me and gave back the photo. “You look happy there.”
I returned the photo carefully to my wallet, deflated by her composure. She didn’t want or need protecting, not yet. And even if she did, who was I to offer it?
She walked over to the dresser and retrieved her purse. She pulled out an envelope. “I got this yesterday in my mailbox. The letters always come in the mail, but they’re not stamped or addressed or anything. Just my name on the front.”
I opened the letter: Mai, Please go room 1215 at Coronado Hotel. 2:00 tomorrow. I leave something for you. Tell front desk your name and they give you the key. Your mother.
It was Suzy’s elfin handwriting. Her robotic English.
I didn’t hide my relief. “At least we know she’s alive and still in town. Yesterday, anyway. That’s all there was?”
“Yeah. Her other letters aren’t that much longer. More like notes really. I don’t have them with me.”
“You started getting them — a month ago, right?”
“A month exactly. This is the fourth one. The first one confused the hell out of me. No one I know would write me in Vietnamese. I had to get some random waitress at a noodle shop to translate it for me.”
“Sounded like you knew Vietnamese just a minute ago.”
“I can speak and understand it okay. But I might as well be reading Chinese. Anyway, in the first letter she says she’s my mother and has wanted to write me all these years, she’s never forgotten me, and she wants me to know she’s watching me now. That was it. Kinda freaked me out. First, I had to believe it was her. Then I had to imagine her out there watching me. Like, how the hell was she doing that?”
“Do you frequent the casinos? Do you work there, I mean?”
She had glanced at me as though I’d just accused her of something. She seemed both leery of my questions and anxious to answer them. “You can say that. I play poker for a living. Don’t look surprised, I make more at cards than I would at anything else.”
“I ask because Suzy was a dealer briefly when she first got here. At the Horseshoe, I think. She might have seen you there. Even dealt to you.”
“I’ve played there, and I’d remember her if she dealt poker. She must have done the table games.” She stopped and squinted at the floor. “Jesus, how many times did I pass her?”
“She’d never written you before? Even when you were younger?”
“She was dead, for all I knew. She left when I was five, a few months after we got to the States. Just disappeared one day without saying a word to anybody. Guess she has a habit of doing that. I have barely any memory of her. She left two weeks before Christmas. Right about now, come to think of it.”
I was ready to say something consoling, but a flash of bitterness in her eyes told me she didn’t want the sympathy.
“Do you know your father?” I said and found myself wincing inside at the thought of whoever he was, someone long before me, someone secret and original.
She shook her head casually. “He died in Vietnam not long after my mother and I escaped. Cancer or something. I can’t remember a thing about him. All I know is that he fought with the Americans and was sent to the reeducation camps after the war and got real sick there. My uncle—his uncle, actually — told me all this. He’s the one who raised me in LA after my mother left, he and my grandaunt.”
“They’ve never heard from her?”
“Wouldn’t have told me if they had. They were hard-core Catholics — unforgiving as hell. She was dead to them, and when I dropped out of college and took up gambling, they cut me off too. Probably started seeing a bit too much of her in me. They weren’t way off, because after my granduncle died a few years back, I left for Vegas and haven’t spoken to anyone in the family since.”