She had asked the question so sincerely that he knew she’d see through a lie. So he said, A little.
Why? What makes you think that?
Because you always seem like you’re looking for something that isn’t there.
She sat back in her chair.
It’s good that Son chose you, she finally said, her eyes calmer now. Instead of your brother. You seem like someone who thinks long and hard before you do anything. I think that’s why you have a sullen face. And why you smoke all the time. You should stop that, by the way. You’re so young and yet I see you coughing all the time.
Suzy waited for a hotel maid to reach the end of the hallway before she spoke again, her voice lowered:
I decided tonight. Just now in my room. I want to ask for your help. You can say yes or no, of course, but from here on it’s all in your hands. There’s nothing I can do about it after tonight.
Victor knew she was about to tell him things she couldn’t take back, but he must have been burning to know what else she meant by that. Suzy had a habit of putting things in that way, as though she had accidentally set your house on fire and had no choice now but to stand back and watch it burn.
She said, You followed me to that apartment I visited last week. That’s my daughter who lives there. I haven’t seen her since she was five. I’ve been writing her letters. She has no memory of me, I’m sure. It’s quite possible she hates me, or doesn’t think of me at all. Twenty years ago, I left her with her granduncle and went as far away as I could. I’m still not sure I can explain why — to you or to myself. I don’t regret it though, as difficult as it was to do. The strange thing is that I’ve never stopped thinking of myself as a mother. You must think that’s ridiculous. How can a woman give up her child and still see herself as a mother? But that’s why I’m here now, talking to you. You’re the first person I’ve ever told this to.
Victor remembered her taking a breath after she said that.
“WAIT A MINUTE,” I stopped him. I had to check the disbelief in my voice. “Why you?”
Victor shrugged slightly. “That afternoon at Mai’s apartment. She recognized me. She saw me in her rearview mirror, smoking out of my car window, and immediately realized what was going on. It really worried her, of course — Mr. Nguyen finding out about Mai. But when she got home, he didn’t act any different with her. If he knew something, she would’ve seen it. He’s not very good at hiding his feelings. So that really shocked her — that I hadn’t reported anything. Somehow she just knew it and decided to trust me.
“There’s another reason. She told me this at the hotel. The night I waited for the ambulance with her — she opened her eyes at one point and started moaning, murmuring to herself. I figured she was too out of it to see or think clearly, but she remembered me kneeling beside her and telling her not to move, that help was coming. She said I held her hand until the ambulance arrived. I guess I did do that.”
Mai spoke up. “So she told you about me, but did she ever tell Sonny? If he met me back on the island, he must have asked her about me. Hey, where’s that daughter of yours? What she doing nowadays? The subject must have come up at least once in two years of marriage.”
Victor didn’t reply immediately. He glanced at me like I already knew the answer. “She told him you had died in a car accident when you were six. She didn’t want him knowing anything about you. To protect you.”
This brought on an exasperated chuckle from Mai as she sat back in her chair. In the dim light, she resembled the dolls on the wall behind Victor. Her smile was as baffled as theirs, and it both stiffened her face and made it seem brittle.
“Why did she start writing me, then? Did she tell you that?”
“Well, she asked me to follow her to her room, and that’s the first thing I saw, the letters on the desk. She said she’d been coming to the room for months to write you. Long letters, apparently — that she hadn’t sent yet. It was the only place she could do it. I figured she wanted me to deliver them to you or something. But then she reached into her knapsack and pulled out a gun and set it on the bed in front of me. She said the hotel was the only place in town she felt safe. And she needed to feel safe, if only for one evening a week. Then she told me that she was leaving Mr. Nguyen, that I knew what he had done to her that night and that he had done other things too and would never ever let her go. She’d have to leave town without him knowing. She could manage that, but she had to do something else before she left. Something for you. For that, she needed my help.”
“The money,” Mai said.
“She knew about Mr. Nguyen’s safe at the restaurant, inside his office. Where he keeps cash from business dealings and all his gambling. I’ve seen him put tens of thousands of dollars in there at a time. She had figured out the combination, and all she needed from me was the code to the alarm and copies of the keys to the restaurant and the office. She offered me twenty thousand. The rest she was leaving for you.”
Mai sat there stiffly. “One hundred thousand dollars,” she murmured, as if to herself, and no longer with that gleam of shock and desire she showed at the hotel. She was appraising, it seemed, the price of her forgiveness.
I could have told her that money had always been about freedom for her mother, that she had made me return her engagement ring so she could put the money in the bank instead — but I felt out of place at the moment sharing something like that, or saying anything at all.
Victor was massaging his brow, adjusting himself in his chair. He’d been recounting everything with a self-assured, strangely nostalgic calm, but Mai’s mention of the one hundred grand had plummeted him back to earth, where the implications of what he’d done must have hit him hard again.
“She had a plan, if that’s what you want to call it.” He sounded impatient. “In a week, once I got her the keys and the alarm code, she was gonna go get all the money in the safe, leave it in a suitcase in that hotel room for you, then leave town. She kept insisting it was all very simple. All I had to do was pretend I didn’t know anything. Just keep following her like normal, like I still didn’t exist to her, and when everything went down, just do whatever Mr. Nguyen and his son ordered.” Victor’s voice tightened, like he was straining to understand his own story. “I told her, though. They already knew about the hotel room. Was it really the safest place? All she said was that it had to be that room. And that she trusted me.”
He put up a hand like one of us had tried to interrupt him. “I know what you’re thinking. Why me, right? How was she so sure I’d go along with all this? That I would trust her and go betray a man I’d been obeying for — how many years now? He’d cut my throat if he had to.”
He was shaking his head feebly now.
“Do you need the money?” Mai said.
“Who doesn’t need the money? The money had nothing to do with it. It still doesn’t.”
Fleetwood Mac’s “As Long As You Follow” had started playing on the jukebox, the opening guitar chords tingeing Victor’s last words with a melodramatic air.
The bartender was leaning over the bar and chatting quietly with the cowboy, like old friends, like co-conspirators. They were the only other people in the place now. The two young women had left some time ago, and their absence somehow reminded me that I was in the desert, in a bar among strangers.
“Why did you do it then?” Mai finally asked Victor. She had dropped her interrogating tone.
I couldn’t quite manage her sincerity yet. When he didn’t reply immediately, I said, “You know he’s a bad man. You always knew that.”