At this last memory, Son laughed loudest and did not seem to mind that we were all silent and serious, waiting for him to continue. I glanced at you and was reminded of your expression on the boat when that woman jumped overboard. I had been too engrossed in Son’s story to see how disturbing it might be for a child your age. But it was too late at that point. And you were never a child your age anyway.
It was still drizzling, and Son wiped his face with his hands. The grin vanished. That ugly man, he said, was the ugliest man he’d ever seen. He remembered staring at his acne scars and wondering if his own face looked worse. The man dragged him to a house at the end of the alley. An old woman lived there. She must have been a nurse or doctor of some kind because she gave Son medicine and stitched up his ear and bandaged it. She shaved his head and cleaned the cuts on his scalp and face, and then made him bathe and gave him new clothes. She handled him with care but never once looked him in the eye or uttered a word. The ugly man also remained silent until the very end, which was when he pointed at the door and said, Go home.
When Son’s mother saw him, she nearly screamed. She was used to him getting into fights, but he had never come home like this. He told her he crashed his bike and that a farmer had found him and helped him. She didn’t believe a word of it, though she said nothing more. Her eyes were quiet with exhaustion. She was still busy waiting for his father to die.
But his father did not die. Nor did he change his ways. Son never told him what happened that day, what he had done for him. And he never gave him the money. It was almost fifty thousand dong, the price of a new bicycle. He stashed it in a pair of old shoes for over three years until the day his father stumbled drunk into the street outside their house one rainy afternoon and was hit by an ice truck. The evening after his funeral, Son took out the money and bought into a card game at that man’s bar. He was barely seventeen, only two years away from becoming, like his dead father, a soldier and a killer of other men. The man recognized him immediately but said nothing. Son lost everything to him in less than an hour.
When Son finished his story, he looked at me and shrugged as if none of it mattered. I struggled for something to say. In the silence that followed, he lay down on his back, closed his eyes, and let the rain beat down upon him.
I wonder if he had ever told anyone this story before us. He might have once, before they were married, lain beside his wife in bed and, as they spoke of those things we all share before falling asleep, suddenly excavated this memory with a mixture of pride and shame and muted desire. What did she say to him afterward? Did she take his hand and squeeze it and whisper her astonishment? Or did she turn from him in the darkness and say nothing?
On our way to the promontory a few days later, Son began speaking to me in an unusually quiet voice. You and the boy were ahead of us on the path. Their paperwork had begun, he said, and a Baptist church in Sacramento, California, had offered to sponsor him and the boy. This was great news for them because Son had no family in the States. And also because he knew your father’s uncle lived in Los Angeles and was sponsoring you and me.
He said he would make his way to Los Angeles as soon as he could, and find work, in a restaurant or a garage, maybe on a fishing boat, and then he would save up money and open his own restaurant where I could cook and host and do whatever I wanted. He would buy a house for all four of us and put you and the boy through school, and also buy a car, one for me as well. He said all this as if stating facts.
I couldn’t tell if marriage had no part in his plans or if it had already become, without my knowing, an unspoken agreement between us. In any case, I held my breath until he finished his day dream. I thought for a moment more and said, I want to ask you for something. You must promise not to think I am crazy.
Son kept his eyes on the path.
I will do everything you say, I said. I will work with you, live with you, cook for you, everything. All I ask is that you give me one year to be on my own. To be alone. Just one year. I will go somewhere, anywhere, I don’t know where yet. But I promise I will come back. I just want to know that you will take care of my daughter, and that you will not think I am crazy. I’ll come back and we can all be a family, and I will never ask you for anything ever again.
Son would not look at me. His face was unchanged.
I was waiting for his questions. Where could I possibly go? What would I do for an entire year, alone in an alien country, no money, no knowledge of anything? It sounded ridiculous even to me. And yet nothing made more sense. All I needed, I thought, was the chance to know what it was like to be unneeded, unwanted, unfettered. Only then could I return to the world as something other than what I had been for the last five years, this misshapen creature full of bitterness and barren of all desire.
I believed at the time that Son would understand all this. His story the previous day had been a confession, if not out of shame then out of a need for me to see him for the man he was and accept it anyway. So now it was my turn. I was ready to tell him about your father and the years after the war, about the day you were born and what I’d suffered every day since, about what happened at sea with that woman and the boy she thought she lost, about my encounter with her on the beach and how I still saw her every night in my dreams, dressed like me and holding you by the hand, guiding you to the edge of a cliff. I was willing to tell him everything, no matter what he might think or say.
But he remained silent for the rest of the walk.
At the promontory, he went directly to his fishing spot down in the cove and ignored everyone. By then you already knew not to bother him during these moods, so you fished in silence next to the boy while I watched you all from above, sitting in my writing spot beneath the trees.
The waters were choppy that day, and I called out for you to be careful. The boy moved closer to you and offered me a reassuring wave. You ignored me.
Some time later, I saw you jump to your feet. You had a catch on your line, which rarely happened, and you were trying desperately to haul it in on your own. The boy was directing and encouraging you, but a moment later your hands were empty and you were peering into the water despondently.
You turned to Son at once and apologized for losing the pole. He took no notice of you, so you wandered over to the far side of the cove to sit by yourself, as though that was your punishment, self-imposed.
A brown gull soon landed on the steep stairway of rocks above you. You got up to get closer to it, and stood there entranced for some time, watching it preen its feathers. The next time I looked back, you were mounting the rocks.
I called out to you and the boy looked up. You had climbed about three meters when the gull flew onto some higher rocks. This didn’t stop you, and again I called out your name. The boy had set down his pole and made his way over to scold you down the rocks. You were out of reach at this point, and still moving steadily up that craggy staircase. Again, the gull flapped its wings and this time alighted on a ledge that was high up enough now to be level with where I was standing on the promontory, watching everything. I had stopped calling you, afraid that my voice might distract you from your climb. You did not seem afraid though. You moved with such purpose and skill.