“I watched her mostly during the day,” he went on. “Mr. Nguyen was home in the evening, and she rarely went out after sundown anyway. The one night I had to keep watch was Thursday night, which has always been Mr. Nguyen’s long session of poker. He plays at the casino from seven in the evening to seven in the morning, so she spends that night alone, and recently she started going to the movies. That didn’t surprise me. I had already followed her one afternoon to a showing of Castaway. Sat four rows behind her and saw her cry several times, even during parts of the movie that weren’t sad at all.”
His face softened. He spoke to Mai with sudden confidence, an intimacy he seemed sure she would reciprocate: “You and her left Vietnam by boat and were at sea for a long time. Awful things happened, I’m sure.” He said a few words in Vietnamese, as if reciting some adage she surely knew too. Then his voice leaned into her. “Mr. Nguyen and his son were also on that boat. All four of you went to the same refugee camp.”
Mai appeared to withdraw from him in her seat. In a small voice, like she was claiming innocence, she said, “My uncle said my mom and I were on Pulau Bidong.” She pronounced the name with Vietnamese inflection.
He nodded. “That’s where she first met him,” he added delicately. “You must have met him too. We were there, actually, me and my brothers. Seven years later, long after you guys left. I think that’s how he first felt he could trust us. Knowing we’d been to the same place, and that our father died there.”
I’d become the stranger at the table. Victor fell silent, and Mai was speechless, cupping her Coke with both hands. I wanted her to know what Junior had told me about him and his father in that camp, how Suzy had loved Sonny long before she met me. I wanted to tell her that as bad as it is to have no memory of something significant you were a part of, it’s much worse to know you were never part of it at all.
“Anyway. .” Victor turned back to me. “I was actually looking forward to going to the movies, but when Thursday came around, she drove to Fremont Street instead. To the Coronado. It was suspicious for sure, her going to the one place in town where Mr. Nguyen and Mr. Jonathan are blacklisted. Anyway, she checked herself into a room with nothing but her purse, and that’s when I got real nervous for her. I had the front desk put me through to the room, but she answered, so I hung up. If someone was in there with her, I knew I had to report it, and there was no telling what Mr. Nguyen would do about that. Then five hours passed and nothing happened. At midnight she came out, checked out of the hotel, and drove home. I tried calling the room again right after she left, but the front desk said it was vacated. So that’s what I told Mr. Jonathan — that Mrs. Nguyen had been alone in there the entire time.”
Victor refilled his glass with the pitcher. He drank like he was thirsty. It seemed to embarrass him, telling us all this, hearing his own voice so much. I wondered if this wasn’t some kind of confession for him, one he was ashamed yet eager to give — more to Mai apparently than to me.
“Do me a favor, Victor,” I said. “Don’t call her that.”
“Mrs. Nguyen? You want me to call her Hong?”
“Whatever. Just don’t call her that.”
He shrugged his assent, and he and Mai exchanged a brief private look like they both understood my pain.
His cell phone chimed and startled all three of us. He picked it up, his eyes gathering Mai and me carefully before he answered it. His voice was low, his Vietnamese soft and slurred, a southern accent. He appeared to be answering questions.
When he hung up a minute later, he said, as if issuing us a warning, “That was Mr. Jonathan. He’ll check on me every two hours.”
“You said something to him about a gun,” Mai said.
“I told him a few weeks ago that I saw your mother buy one at a pawnshop. I was just reminding him there.”
“So she’s packing heat too? Jesus, is this woman seriously my mother?”
“But she hates guns,” I said to them both. “Never even touched one. She bought a gun?”
“Not exactly,” Victor replied. “But she does have one.”
“So you lied to him?”
“About her buying the gun, yeah. She’d actually taken one of his.”
“Then why mention it at all?”
“Because she wanted me to.”
In the silence that followed, he put a fresh cigarette between his lips, then changed his mind for some reason and inserted it back into the pack before returning to his story.
AFTER THAT FIRST TRIP to the Coronado, he spent most of the following week sitting in his car, watching their house from his curbside seat. The only time Suzy left home was for groceries, the mail, or takeout at the nearby Chinese place. Through his binoculars, he could see how unkempt her hair and clothes were and how stark her face looked, like she was perpetually waking from a nap. I knew that face from all her long melancholy spells, going to bed as soon as she got home from work, sleeping until two in the afternoon on her off days, sometimes spending the entire day in bed watching television. Victor said she moved like an old woman.
When Thursday evening arrived, however, she came out of the house in a dress with her hair brushed and her face made. She was carrying a red knapsack. As she had the previous week, she drove to the Coronado and checked herself again into room 1215.
Victor tried to stay out of sight, but just in case she spotted him, he had also started wearing baseball caps and sunglasses, which must have got to him. I could see it now on his face. It wears on you — watching someone who doesn’t know you’re there, who doesn’t know they should be hiding from you. After a while, you start feeling like the one hiding from them.
But did Suzy know he was there that entire time? Sitting in his anonymous rental by her curb, the same guy who picked up her husband every morning in a funereal Lexus, that dark figure behind the steering wheel and the tinted windows? Had he made some sort of impression on her from that distance, even before this mess started? Her world was hardly big enough for the people in her life, let alone those on the periphery. So how did Victor get in?
To look more like a hotel guest that night, he wore a suit. He sat in a chair across from the elevators, just around the corner from her room. Anytime he heard someone approach, he lifted the magazine he was reading. He must have wondered how long he could keep this up before she started noticing him there every time she left her room, or before some hotel staffer or security camera noticed too. Maybe it was that night that he realized how tiring it was to hide. Maybe that’s why he was careless.
Nothing happened for a couple of hours. Hardly a soul passed him in the hallway except for the hotel maids rolling their cleaning carts.
At some point, he dozed off. He didn’t know for how long, but when he opened his eyes, Suzy was sitting on the edge of the chair next to his and eyeing him like she’d been waiting for him to awake.
She spoke to him in Vietnamese, a proper northern accent, which often makes southerners feel inferior. She told me that once when I laughed at her English. I’m not a dummy, she chided me. In Vietnam I speak beautifully.
Tell me, little brother, she said to Victor. What is your name?
He told her his Vietnamese name. Perhaps he was still in shock, because it never occurred to him to lie or deny anything.
You’ve been following me. For my husband.
When he nodded, it felt like a confession.
He believes I’m crazy, she said. His son does too. You’ve been watching me for some time now. Please tell me the truth. Do I seem like a crazy person to you?