She was sitting on the edge of the bed and talking mostly to the dresser. I could sense that she had wanted to tell someone these things for a long time.
“So there were two other letters.”
“Yeah. In English, actually. It was weird — her English wasn’t that good, but that made it easier for me to read, you know? Less intimate maybe. Less of her real voice. I wasn’t ready to hear that yet. In the second letter, she says she called up my cousin in LA two years ago and pretended to be an old friend of mine, and my cousin — that twit — tells her I’m a drug addict and a gambler in Vegas, which is only half true. So anyway she moved here and tracked me down. She says she doesn’t like it here, but it reminds her of Vietnam for some reason, and she starts going on about the mountains and the skies in Vietnam. Bad poetry, honestly. She says she hopes I quit the drugs and the gambling and visit the homeland some day. It’ll help me. Who told her I needed helping? I kept thinking of her living here all this time, driving past my apartment, then putting shit in my mailbox — when I’m at home, even. She came here to look for me and she found me, and for two years she didn’t do anything. So why now?”
Her voice had gotten small, and she was picking at a thread on the bedcover. She became a child all of a sudden, as though she’d been spending the last ten minutes suppressing any part of herself that might seem young or feminine or weak. She was a clarified version of her mother, with all the carefulness but none of the mystery, and that somehow eased my mind amid the shock of all she was telling me.
The moment passed and she stood from the bed, stuffing her hands into the pockets of her jeans. “By the way — what did you mean, ‘at least she’s alive’? Were you afraid she was dead?”
“Not exactly. I just want to find her as soon as possible and make sure she’s okay.”
She was studying me again with that hard burrowing stare. “She divorced you, didn’t she?” I must have shown some annoyance because she said, “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I said that.”
I swallowed and waved away the apology. “It’s all right. Your mother did leave me. And yes, I’ve never stopped caring for her.” She nodded sheepishly, so I pressed on, “Tell me about that third letter.”
“That was the oddest one. It came last Saturday. She says she’s going somewhere, and that before she leaves she has to give me something. She also says that one of these days everything will be explained to me. Still not sure what she means by ‘everything.’ I don’t know if it’s me or her English or if she’s just trying to be the most mysterious person on earth.”
“She had a habit of that too. Don’t take it personally.”
The girl almost smiled, which startled me, made me aware of how intimate our conversation had become.
I said, “Did she give you any indication in her letters that she wanted to meet?”
Her face fell, again that childish demeanor, that instant smallness, eyes averted and lips pursed. “No. I figured she might be here, waiting for me. I was all ready with things to say.”
I looked around the room. “So what did she leave you?”
She shrugged. “Didn’t have much time to look before you started knocking on the door.”
I walked into the bathroom and started searching the cabinets, the tub, the hamper. Mai was picking through the nightstand drawer when I came back out. “The dresser has nothing either.”
“Have you checked the closet?”
She shook her head.
The brown carry-on suitcase stood beside the ironing board in the closet, with a notecard taped to it. Mai, written in red marker. I carried it to the bed. It weighed a good thirtysomething pounds and looked brand-new.
“I’ll do it if you want,” I said, but she was already trying to unzip it. Then we both saw the small silver lock.
She grabbed her purse and rummaged through it until she finally fished out a tiny chrome key. “This was also in the envelope.” She shrugged apologetically. “I didn’t know yet if I should tell you.”
She inserted the key into the lock, and it opened. She hesitated a second before unzipping the carry-on and flipping it open.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” she whispered.
It was packed with jumbled bricks of cash. She picked up one and flipped through the twenty-dollar bills. I did too. Fifty bills a brick. It took me a while to count all the bricks. About a hundred in all.
“Goddamn,” I said. “There’s got to be a hundred grand here.”
“They’re real,” she muttered, inspecting a bill under the lamplight and feeling it between her fingers. She plopped herself on the bed beside the carry-on. “She left this all for me?”
“I don’t think it’s hers to leave.” I gently took the brick from her hand. She gave me a defensive look. I replaced the money and zipped up the suitcase and went through the outer pockets and sleeves. Nothing but a few silica gel packets.
I turned to her. “Mai, listen to me carefully. Do you know a man named Sonny Nguyen?”
She shook her head.
“Are you sure? He plays a lot of poker in town. Short, bald, about fifty. Mean-looking.”
“Half the Vietnamese guys that play are balding and trying to look mean. One at every table.”
“How about a Jonathan Nguyen?”
“Am I supposed to know these guys?”
“Well, Sonny is your mother’s new husband. Jonathan is his son. This is their money.”
“You know this for sure? Why can’t it be hers?”
“A hundred grand? Your mother had nothing when she left me, and she stopped working when she married Sonny. I doubt he’s this generous. She took this money from him. No wonder they’re desperate to find her.” I banged my fist on the suitcase. “Goddamn it, how can she be this stupid! She didn’t think they’d come after you too?”
Mai gave me a moment before saying, “Maybe I should be scared, but I’m more confused than anything. Who are these guys?”
I turned away from her so she couldn’t see my face and that exasperated flush that only Suzy could inflict on me.
“I guess you can call them businessmen,” I said. “High-class smugglers, actually, gamblers in every way. The father’s got an ugly temper and has had more than a few run-ins with the law, so the son seems to run everything — a restaurant, a pet store, black-market shit, who knows what else. Anyway, it’s not about who they are. It’s about what they’re willing to do to get what they want. And now I know what they want.”
“But you said you were helping them.”
“I didn’t have a choice. Listen, I don’t have time now to explain. You need to leave this hotel. They can’t know you were here or who you are or that you even exist.”
She glanced again at the carry-on. “And what are you gonna do — stay here?” She gave me a stiff look, unsure of the accusation she was making but making it anyway.
“Hey, I don’t want any part of this. Trust me. If I had a choice, I’d be on the 15 back to Oakland.”
Her face tightened. I was using my severe-cop voice, but she wasn’t having any of it. We had a hundred grand in cash staring at us, and I was still as much a stranger to her as her own mother. That’s when it hit me, with relief but sudden melancholy, that Suzy had already come today and would not be coming again — that I no longer had a reason to be here.
I softened my tone. “How about this — I go with you. You barely know me, I know, but I need your help getting out of town, and you need my help too. We can’t be too careful about this. And the sooner we both go, the better.”